nonsensical text

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

raisin bread



Gosh, it’s been awhile since I slept with bread. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how to do it until I reread the recipe over at Mary’s place. I guess it is a bit like riding a bicycle – it comes back to you as you go through the motions. Even so, those first few laps back on the bike are usually fraught with wobbles and uncertainty. I mustn’t expect too much of myself until the dust loosens from my joints.

Oh, desolations and consolations, where art thou?

So much stirs under the surface. My desolations would seem so small: My oldest started college classes this fall at the community college; he was accepted elsewhere, but chose this option as best suiting his schedule. The instigator is back to school in the real world. The remaining four are schooling at home. Yes, indeed, the pink one has begun the journey. All of these things add up to a multitude of small stresses and a return to morning person status (not my favorite rotation). My father is still in an assisted living facility, but things have been up and down in that regard due to administrative changes. In the current incarnation, he is feeling unsettled due to the return of an aide (who is not his “favoritist” person in the world), thus he has lately been requiring extra energy on the part of my sister and myself. My mother, love her as I do, lives alone and requires (daily) a sounding board for all of her tangents – usually during the school day.

Shriveled, the “me” cowers on the inside – taking less time than I should to pull my eyes away from me and onto God, away from me and onto my family, away from me and onto others. Yet ironically, I spend so much time focusing on me that I somehow manage to convince myself that I am spending no time on me at all. Like a grape in the sun, sustaining hydration seeps away. I am raisin.

There’s a funny thing about raisins, though – when properly stored, somehow they maintain their juiciness. The sweetness on the inside is compounded.

The environment I would store myself in would dry the raisin into nothing but a shrunken pebble. How great the consolation that my God knows a thing or two about hydration – a God who can even bring dry bones back to life. That knowledge might not always seep as far as my heart, but the conviction never falters in my mind. I do not presume it to be true; I know it more surely than I trust the earth’s rotation, the ebb and flow of tides, or even gravity.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
Romans 8:37, KJV

Labels: