I've been reading a book Mom Turner got out the library called "The Woman Who Can't Forget" written by a woman named Jill Price who has perfect autobiographical recall. While Jill's story about how her memory works is interesting, what has been extremely interesting to me so far is actually her commentary about how and why people forget things. She gives some paraphrasing from a book called "The Seven Sins of Memory" by Dr. Daniel Schacter, detailing seven types of inaccurate memory.
Here's a list of the seven "sins": 1.) "Transience": the normal loss of memory due simply to time. Most people begin to lose memory of events within hours of them happening and days later can often remember nothing of these small events at all. 2.) "Absentmindedness": forgetting where you put the car keys, why you walked into a room, adding baking powder to the recipe twice. Apparently, people who study brains and how they work have a theory that absentmindedness usually appears when the brain is busily at work on another issue and has "cleared the decks", so to speak, for that issue while dropping the processing of less important things. That explains why some really fantastically intelligent people I know can be almost comically absentminded. 3.) "Blocking": something's on the tip of your tongue but you just can't quite say it or you know you just thought of a good birthday present for your brother but now it's just not coming to mind. You know it'll come back to you at 3 AM, but for now it's a total blank. Those three "sins" are called "sins of omission" in the book, meaning they're pretty much involuntary and happen because the brain is just working a particular way. The next four are called "sins of commission" because you are somewhat in control of making them happen. 4.) "Misattribution": you were positive you spoke to Grandma about going shopping while we were at Mom's birthday celebration last week, but really you talked to her about it while you were taking her to church a few days before; or you thought you already told your sister about accidentally shrinking her sweater in the dryer when really, you'd only told your mother. The innocent explanation for this is that it appears our brains do not store our memories all in one place. To reconstruct an event, we draw memory from different files in our brains and then piece them together to form a cohesive event. This can take up to 10 seconds and is pretty vulnerable to errors. We can call up different bits of memory and string them together in what seems to us a complete story even when it's all mixed up. This is one of many places it really pays to be humble, however: because when someone corrects the error, a humble person can then have the memory pieced back together properly while an arrogant person goes on with their totally wrong series of events and drives everyone around them bonkers. 5.) "Suggestibility": this is the creation of an outright false memory. Your brother is sure Dad didn't say we were supposed to paint today, so you remember the same thing; or you've heard a family story so many times you're positive you were there when you really weren't. Apparently, kids are especially susceptible to this, which is why you'll have children testifying in vivid detail about how their parents abused them when in reality, no such abuse occurred and none of the "facts" they're relating match up to any evidence. Actually, witness recall in general is often so unreliable due to suggestibility that there are studies showing how unhelpful they can be in accurately determining things that happened right in front of them. I seem to recall a comical episode in Adam 12 where the two officers interview witnesses to a crime and the descriptions are so wildly different that in the end they have to ignore all of it. 6.) "Bias": I agree with Jill Price that this is one of the most insidious of all memory problems, because it's actually a problem with being untruthful. There are several types of bias, but in the end they all come down to being truthful: you want to believe things were the same in the past as they are now, so you actually alter your own memories to fit your purposes. In a hindsight bias, for instance, you say, "That Mr. Wickham - I always mistrusted his appearance of goodness!" In change bias, you really think you've changed something in your life that your friends and relations know you haven't really changed at all - "My temper has really improved since I've been taking anger management classes"; it's interesting that with this bias, people will not only exaggerate how much they've changed, but how bad things were in the past. Consistency bias is where you want your thoughts and emotions to remain the same over time, so whatever they are now is (in your mind) what they've always been - you supported the Iraq war initially but now you don't, so you believe that you never did. My family had another name for this that isn't quite as nice as "bias" - we always called it "lying to yourself." 7.) "Persistence": this is where you allow one memory to haunt you in such out-of-proportion ways that it gradually consumes your thoughts and becomes a thing you dwell on. If you do this with some really terrible memories, it can actually cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder - there's a story in the book of a baseball player who made a bad pitch at a crucial moment and dwelt on in so much afterward that he went crazy and shot his wife and himself because he could not let it go. I think this might often arise from a lack of forgiveness, both for ourselves and other people. As I'm reading this book, it's occurred to me that paying attention to how our memories work could be pretty beneficial for a couple of reasons: because being truthful with what we remember is one way we make decisions in the future; because being careful not to regard our memory as infallible is a good way to be a peacemaker; because memory is such a tricky and delicate thing that we need to not hold onto it so tightly that we totally lose track of what's actual going on right in front of us. If anyone was wondering where I've been for the past week, I've been outside. My time on the computer has been limited to keeping up my calorie count log (hey, I gained TEN pounds from being pregnant only three months...if I don't get that under control, I'm going to get really fat next time around!), but all the other spare time has been devoted to breaking the sod out of the garden, shaking off the dirt, bagging it all up, getting rid of the bags...and getting the dirt ready to plant.
I know I've posted a few times about the garden before, but this time I get to report that the garden bed has been prepared and we have herbs, tomatoes, green beans, and cucumbers planted. Hopefully this weekend I'll add some peppers, four more tomato plants, and a zucchini plant. You'll notice it's only one zucchini plant. I think that's pretty much all I can keep up with: as Garrison Keilor notes, if you want decent-sized zucchini, you have to reach for the blossom. If you're any later than that, you end up with a monster thing that resembles a watermelon more than a squash. As I was out prepping the bed for planting seeds, I realized that this is the biggest vegetable garden I've ever been able to plant. It's the first one big enough to need proper furrows. It's the first one I might be able to grow a whole variety of things I've never had room for before like potatoes and carrots. In the back of my brain, I remember how much work it's going to be to keep this garden up - weed it, make sure the ground stays at the proper moisture level, trouble-shoot whatever bugs or diseases pop up, harvest the vegetables at the right time, preserve whatever we can't eat - but at the moment I'm getting ready to plant the seeds I'm unusually extravagant. Sure, I'll get myself into this: because it's so exciting to see all those vegetable seedlings going into the ground and I'm looking forward to the crop. It helps that Dad Turner is more excited than I am. He's bringing in plants faster than I can get the spots ready for planting and between him and Ben it's difficult not to get enthusiastic about the summer vegetable crop. Gotta go. Our beautiful warm sunshine is drying out the dirt and if we want those seeds to sprout, I'd better go water them. One of the most memorable stories in the book "The Hiding Place" by Corrie Ten Boom comes near the end, when she and her sister Betsy were in (I believe) the Ravensbruck concentration camp. I'm telling the story from memory, since I don't have the book, but the gist of it is that she and Betsy managed to smuggle a New Testament in with them and would conduct Bible studies on certain nights with the other women in their bunkhouse. Having the book was forbidden and there was a strict curfew, so they would've been in serious trouble if they'd been caught; but night after night they continued, reading and studying the Bible in spite of the restrictions.
During one evening when they were not having a study, Betsy mentioned to Corrie that she'd been thinking of the passage, "Be joyful always, pray continually, and give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." "We need to give thanks for all of it," she said to Corrie. "It says in all circumstances." So they began praying, thanking God one by one for the guards and the cold and the imprisonment itself. But then Betsy said, "And thank you Lord for the fleas." The bunkhouse they were in had a particularly nasty problem with fleas and it was a source of constant irritation to the women sleeping there. Corrie had found them almost intolerable. "Oh Betsy," she said, "surely not the fleas!" "In all circumstances," Betsy repeated. So Corrie grudgingly thanked God for the fleas. Some time later, they discovered the reason why they had been able to continue their Bible studies so long unmolested by the guards: the guards didn't want to go near that specific bunkhouse because the flea infestation was so bad. The fleas had been a blessing all along, even when they seemed like a curse. Now, I don't have anything so seriously difficult as a life in a concentration camp to thank God for in my life; but I started thinking this afternoon how easy it is to let little things become a complaint and then let the complaint become such a Big Deal that it totally overshadows all the good that's in my life. If I start allowing myself just a little complaint now and then, the next thing I know I'll be one of those people who is never content or satisfied because there's always something wrong and annoying and irritating and worthy of complaining about. And in the end...what if the very thing I'm complaining about is really a specially-designed blessing? All that complaining would totally blind me to it and rob the joy out of everything else. Then I realized something else: I'm allowing myself little complaints. And they're beginning to stack up. I think it's something very important for me to do, to thank God every day - honestly and out loud - for the fleas. Little nagging annoyances that I'm letting bother me. "Thank you, Lord, that we have no dishwasher. Thank you for the opportunity to keep track of Grandma's medicine. Thank you for all the thistles growing in the hedge. Thank you for the bathtub that needs washing. Thank you that Ben is gone without me today. Thank you that Grandma wants her bed made." Of course, the thing I noticed right away is that once I started listing stuff that was bugging me, I started seeing all the good part or counterpart to each annoyance - or at least noticing that whatever it was tended to be a pretty silly thing to be annoyed about. Being content is a surprisingly fragile thing. You can be a very contented person and let that contentment slip away for no real reason whatsoever when you start allowing yourself to feel annoyed at little things. A discontented person is no fun to live with - they're not even fun for themselves to live with because they're too busy being miserable to enjoy anything. In the words of the STP commercial on the radio, "Don't be that guy!" Or girl. I'm also very thankful I do not have to be thankful for fleas. In my family, it's not all that unusual for a person to simply decide to become an expert in something and suddenly begin researching it. "I'd like to make our own cider press," someone might announce; or, "You know, I've been watching these stop-motion videos and I'm going to make a Lego stop motion movie." On the surface of it, the things we decide to do may occasionally seem random, perhaps not entirely productive, and sometimes downright nuts. I remember one sibling checking out every book the library had on becoming a paramedic and taking all the self tests until they could begin passing them, simply out of curiosity. Not because they really wanted to become a paramedic, but because they were just interested. I know other families who do this on a much grander scale than we do. "I want to put the slate roof on Oma's house," one teenager told his father; and proceeded to do so. "I think we should get a back-hoe," another said; that family is now expert at building even tricky foundations.
So yesterday when Ben turned around from his computer while I was making dinner and said, "I want to make dandelion wine," I did not bat an eyelash. "Okay," I said. Grandma said, "Oh sure. How are you going to do that?" "Well, here's a recipe," Ben said. "You start by picking two quarts of flowers and soaking them for two days." I reached into the cupboard and brought out our large glass measuring pitcher. "Here's two quarts," I said. "Looks like we have plenty of flowers behind the garage." And off Ben went to gather two quarts of dandelion flowers. "You don't think he's really going to try to make wine, do you?" Grandma said to me. "Sure," I said. "He's got a recipe. We've got all the ingredients. Why not?" "Because that's just..." She waved a hand and started laughing. "Nuts." Okay, yes, it is. A little bit. But Ben's had a curiosity about dandelion wine for a long time and if he decides to make it...well, who knows? Besides settling his curiosity, he might also discover something new and interesting to be used in future endeavors. Some people have wondered before if I'm just not a very curious person when I'm content to let things happen without my involvement. That's gotten me wondering if I'm not really a very curious person; but I've come to the conclusion that my brand of curiosity involves pursuing things that you find fascinating without bothering about that fact that normal people do not go pick all the dandelion flowers in their yard to make wine out of them. Ben is even more curious than I am. If something catches his attention, he does not let go of it until he has satisfied his curiosity about it; and he is curious about many, many things I take for granted. That's why he wasn't content to keep on not knowing if he believed in God or not but set out to determine..."Does God exist and should I believe in him?" You would not believe the library he acquired in the meantime. We'll have to see how the dandelion wine goes. It'll be done next May sometime. And yes, I promised Ben that if he makes it, I will taste it with him. Mom got a message in her inbox this week that Jonathan's blog was considered a "Blogger Legacy" account and Blogger is twilighting all these types of accounts as of the end of May. She asked me to go and save it since she didn't want to lose the posts or pictures even though the blog hasn't been updated in six years.
I haven't been on Blogger for quite a while; and actually, it's been so long since I updated Jonathan's site that I didn't have the foggiest idea what the password was. I retrieved everything, though, and moved the blog to my name while applying a new template so the blog can live on. There's something sad about a blog that hasn't been updated in six years, though. I started thinking of all the updates we should've done, like the day Jonathan got his glasses for the first time, or the day he took his first steps at the age of three. Not to mention talking about moving to a new house or the first time he said, "Mom!" It's hard to believe the last time I wrote an update on that site, Jonathan was crawling and almost two years from walking. Thing is, I began it when he was born and we didn't know how long he would be in the hospital or how he was going to do when we got him home. He wasn't just our newest baby: he was our newest baby with a whole train of question marks in tow and all our friends and family were concerned about what was going on with him. It was hard to keep everyone updated and the blog was the easiest way to keep in touch. Once he'd been home for years and was growing just fine, having whole website entries devoted to him seemed unnecessary and time-consuming. So I stopped. One of the things about keeping a blog is that it's hard to see what's going to be important to you in the future at the time that you're sitting there trying to figure out to write. I often sit down and think, "What can I write about that's not going to be boring?" When you're keeping a blog about a little boy who takes years to learn what many kids learn in weeks or months, updating frequently is a slow and boring process at the time; but today as I was looking at that six year blank in the archives, I realized I should've stuck to it anyway. Mom Turner has what amounts to a dedicated hobby of documenting everything that happens in the lives of her family through photographs and short story paragraphs. When you go down in their basement, you're confronted with rows and rows of photo albums that have been numbered and organized and packed onto shelves lining the walls: rows of documentation of things that would otherwise be forgotten. It's an awe-inspiring sight even to a determined minimalist like me who goes through her possessions and tosses a good chunk of them regularly because I don't like keeping Collections of Stuff in order. It's awe-inspiring because it's a record, a careful collection of moments otherwise too small to remember. A well-kept blog is something very similar (though I admit this one is seriously short on photographs!). Which brings me to why I'm updating today. Because sometimes I procrastinate posting here. Because reviving Jonathan's blog and applying a new template to it reminded me that I do have a live site and it's worth keeping that way. Six years down the road I'll be happy I did. Because one moment I can remember today is that I brought Jonathan's website out of retirement after putting it off for six years. Now that's procrastination. There's a tempest in a teapot going on in New York over a standardized test that was given to 8th graders recently. Apparently, it's a test that's in use around the country with similar results: the students (usually about 13 or 14, I guess - though an unintended side effect of being homeschooled is that a little difficult for me to translate grades to ages off-hand) are totally baffled by this story.
I'm going to write out the story because I think it'll add to the point. It's an adaptation of a Daniel Pinkwater children's story included his his novel "Borgel". In the test, the directions are to read this story and then answer questions 6 - 11. The Hare and the Pineapple In olden times, the animals of the forest could speak English just like you and me. One day, a pineapple challenged a hare to a race. (I forgot to mention, fruits and vegetables were able to speak too). A hare is like a rabbit, only skinnier and faster. This particular hare was known to be the fastest animal in the forest. "You, a pineapple, have the nerve to challenge me, a hare, to a race?" the hare asked the pineapple. "This must be some sort of joke." "No," said the pineapple. "I want to race you. Twenty-six miles, and may the best animal win." "You aren't even an animal!" the hare said. "You're a tropical fruit!" "Well, you know what I mean," the pineapple said. The animals of the forest thought it was very strange that a tropical fruit should want to race a very fast animal. "The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve," a moose said. "Pineapples don't have sleeves," an owl said. "Well, you know what I mean," the moose said. "If a pineapple challenges a hare to a race, it must be that the pineapple knows some secret trick that will allow it to win." "The pineapple probably expects us to root for the hare and then look like fools when it loses," said a crow. "Then the pineapple will win the race because the hare is overconfident and takes a nap, or gets lost, or something." The animals agreed that this made sense. There was no reason a pineapple should challenge a hare unless it had a clever plan of some sort. So the animals, wanting to back a winner, all cheered for the pineapple. When the race began, the hare sprinted forward and was out of sight in less than a minute. The pineapple just sat there, never moving an inch. The animals crowded around, watching to see how the pineapple was going to cleverly beat the hare. Two hours later, when the hare crossed the finish line, the pineapple was still sitting still, and hadn't moved an inch. The animals ate the pineapple. MORAL: Pineapples don't have sleeves. 6.) Beginning with paragraph 4, in what order are the events in the story told? A Switching back and forth between places B In the order in which events happen C Switching back and forth between the past and the present D In the order in which the hare tells the events to another animal 7.) The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were A hungry B excited C annoyed D amused 8.) Which animal spoke the wisest words? A The hare B The moose C The crow D The owl 9.) Before the race, how did the animals feel toward the pineapple? A Suspicious B Kindly C Sympathetic D Envious 10.) What would have happened if the animals had decided to cheer for the hare? A The pineapple would have won the race. B They would have been mad at the hare for winning. C The hare would have just sat there and not moved. D They would have been happy to have cheered for a winner. 11.) When the moose said that the pineapple has some trick up its sleeve, he means that the pineapple A is wearing a disguise B wants to show the animals a trick C has a plan to fool the animals D is going to pull something out of its sleeve ****************************************************************************************************************************************** Now, according to the New York Times, the overwhelming reaction of students to this test was one of bafflement. Students were apparently raising their hands saying things like, "This story doesn't make sense!" Some were made nervous by the "jokiness" of the story and started overthinking the test questions. Here's a quote from the article (which can be read HERE) One of the disputed questions asked, essentially, which was the wisest animal. Some students said that none of the animals seemed very bright, but that a likely answer was the owl, because it was the one that uttered the moral. Others worried that the owl was a distraction, because owls are supposed to be wise, so it would be the wrong answer. The other tough question was why the animals ate the pineapple. Students were torn between two of the four choices: they were annoyed or they were hungry; either one seemed to work. It took a class of gifted students to decide firmly that the owl was the wisest and that the animals ate the pineapple because they were annoyed. And then the school district decided the answers to this particular set of questions wouldn't be included in the test results because so many people complained about how silly the test was. Many people who are against standardized testing have jumped on board, saying the story was so nonsensical that it can't accurately measure how intelligent the 13 and 14 year olds really are because it's too hard to figure out. Don't get me wrong: I don't think current teach-to-the-test methods being employed in public schools are doing kids much of a favor in regards to their actual education; but personally, I find the fact the kids couldn't figure this story out a little disturbing. I tried my sister Katherine on it and she aced the answers. Katherine is 11. Apparently she's a genius. You know what I think? The irony in this whole situation is that the students, when confronted with this nonsense little parody on the tortoise and the hare did exactly what the animals in the story did. They worried that the test had something up its sleeve and over-thought the answers to the point where they got all confused. And in the end, they've essentially eaten the pineapple by getting rid of any questions having to do with the story because they were too "silly" and hard to figure out. Pineapples don't have sleeves. And neither did this test. As Lauren said, it's only a matter of time before Benjamin takes the reins of the blog and "takes a hand in the story telling." So here I am.
Today is an example of what life is like these days - not perfect, but absolutely wonderful. One question I get is "How's married life?" and I don't always know what to say. Usually "wonderful" or "very good". And that's all true. But today I reflected upon a single moment and I knew that if someone told me married life would be like this I wouldn't believe them. That single moment was just about an hour ago. I might as well summarize what led to that moment: I woke up this morning with my wife by my side. Mornings usually involve waking up to the alarm clock (it's usually my duty to get up and turn it off) and promptly get back in bed. I know that sounds extremely lazy, but that's why we set the alarm clock about 45 minutes earlier than required. Then the REAL alarm clock begins when Lauren says "wakeupwakeupwakupwakup" which effectively gets me going. We get up and I got the coffee brewing. Lauren made a parfait of Greek yogurt, real maple syrup, granola, blueberries and strawberries which puts McDonald's parfait to shame. Grandma Lila came and joined us for her usual cereal and banana (which she really enjoys). Then Lauren read to me while I took a shower, then we switched places and I read while she showered. We are reading a book about raising Godly children which a family friend has written, and it has opened some very great conversation between Lauren and I. We got dressed, I checked my email and Lauren made the bed. We opened the windows and felt the warm breeze and figured it was a good day for a walk. So we walked around the neighborhood (about 1 mile) and we got back just in time for Mom to come by from next door. Grandma had a doctors appointment today to check on her leg. So Mom and Lauren went with Grandma to the doctors and I went off to work. I am extremely blessed to have a job which does not require a large number of hours to sustain our household. This allows me more time to be with Lauren and Grandma Lila. So when the end of the work day arrived, I came home and Lauren was cooking Mexican food. Yes, Mexican food! We are approaching that moment of bliss. We all sat down, gave thanks to God, and chowed down on tacos. Hand fried taco shells too. I made Grandma's soft taco and I loaded up my tacos. It was really yummy. After dinner, Grandma started playing Chopin's Nocturne and I helped Lauren with the dishes and when we were done I sat down. During the walk earlier today I had hurt my foot, so Lauren borrowed some of Grandma's foot cream and started rubbing my foot. And it was in THAT moment I thought "If I were to have told myself ten years ago that I would be sitting here, full of Mexican food, listening to Grandma Lila playing Chopin, getting my feet rubbed - I wouldn't have believed it". But there I was. So when people ask me "How's Married Life?" I should tell them "better than I ever could have possibly imagined." And if you noticed that this blog was primarily about food, I suppose the saying is true: The way to a man's heart in through his stomach. Especially Mexican food! Courtesy of Passover Week, Ben and I have been spending quite a while discussing what is leaven and what exactly God had in mind by telling his people in strict no-nonsense terms not to have leaven in their homes during this week. It has been Ben's belief for several years that leaven - and leavened bread - is something God uses to indicate sin in peoples' lives, a sort of visual aid for people to understand what sin in our lives is actually like. Ben has included any kind of food that's puffed up in his definition of "leavened", which has led us to a spirited discussion over whether or not yeast, baking soda, and baking powder are all the same things and what God was trying to get his people to do in the first place.
Ultimately, this has lead to some very interesting discoveries - about God's thought process and the history of yeast, among other things. Yeast is actually a bacteria, something that floats around in the air and - oddly enough - is naturally found lodged in the Human digestive tract. It's a living organism and the only way to capture and coerce it into making your lump of dough rise is feed it properly so it will stay alive, eat and grow. Anyone who bakes bread will tell you a small amount of yeast is all it takes to make even five or six loaves of bread rise if the yeast is strong and well-treated. So it's everywhere, it's easy to attract and grow, and a little of it can leaven a lot of dough. A little sin mixed into a life can make the whole life imperfect, and sin might as well be floating in the air because it's pretty easy to come by. A little nourishing is all it takes to grow a nice big batch. And when it's done it's work, the person is all puffed up with themselves just like bread dough full of well-fed yeast. God wanted his people to focus on getting every little bit of yeast out of their homes and diets for a whole week, and the only real way to do this is give everything a good scouring and then eat flat pancakes. It's a perfect physical prop for teaching us about getting the sin out of our lives and how impossible it is to actually do completely. Though to God, calling it just a "physical prop" might be undercutting the seriousness of it because he said, "Any of you eating yeast during the Feast of Unleavened Bread is going to be cut off from my people." Yikes. He was not fooling around. While the consequences of eating yeast were slightly less severe than someone making the Sabbath a common day (the penalty for that was death), it was still pretty rough. God did NOT want his people missing the opportunity to learn something about him and about themselves. Which brings us to the history of yeast and how it's used. In the process of the discussion about God's thought process, we discovered a fascinating piece of history. While the ancient Egyptians didn't invent the idea of leavening bread, they were the first to actually isolate yeast and introduce it into their dough as a separate agent (rather than relying on the old method of saving a bit of dough from the last batch to add to the newest one). The Greeks learned about yeast from the Egyptians and from Greece the process of isolating and using yeast in bread spread throughout Europe, where it was used as the only leavening agent available until the 1700s when sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) was discovered - a 3,000-year uncontested monopoly! The Egyptians more or less came up with a process that is still used today to make one of the world's most common foods: a loaf of bread. The use of yeast and making of yeast bread pretty much as we know it today was probably something the Egyptians of Moses' time were rather proud of. It was a great societal invention probably symbolic in those days of scientific advancement, luxury, and the Egyptian way of life. When God told his people to clean the leaven from their homes, he said, "Get rid of the Egyptian pride and joy." So why didn't God just tell his people to quit eating yeast altogether? Because he didn't. In fact, on the Feast of Pentacost - the day that commemorates the giving of the Covenant at Sinai and for Christians, the giving of the New Covenant after Jesus' Resurrection - he specifically commanded his people to bake leavened bread in their homes and bring it to offer to the Lord with a sacrifice (Lev 23:17). Ultimately, the bread was eaten by the priests...after it had been lifted up as an offering before the Lord. So on the day the Holy Spirit came down on the believers in Jerusalem, a whole lot of leavened bread was being lifted up before God in celebration of the enacting of the old Covenant at Sinai. This actually has a perfectly logical reasoning to it. God commanded that all thanksgiving peace offerings be accompanied by unleavened bread. A peace offering that was being made to restore a friendly relationship between God and the sacrificer, however was made with leavened bread (Lev 7:13). So if you were making an offering to God saying, "I want to be in friendship with you again", you lifted up leavened bread before God. As if you were lifting up your sins to him and giving them up. So God was consistent in maintaining the pattern of his old Covenant while establishing the New Covenant. The point still is that God did not command his people to stop eating yeast altogether. He deliberately made it a point to have them reintroduce yeast into their homes at least by fifty days after the Feast of Unleavened Bread. I think this is because God is always concerned with setting things apart, making them holy - which simply means making them uncommon. I just realized that I wrote a few paragraphs earlier that yeast bread has become one of the world's most common food products. That doesn't make it bad; but it's certainly common. If the Israelite people had simply stopped using yeast, unleavened bread would never be set apart or different for them and they wouldn't have given it much thought or considered what it meant to have leaven and then remove it. I also think God doesn't consider yeast an abomination the same way he does other things, so while he found it a useful visual aid to teach a much deeper truth (how sin infects our hearts), he didn't say, "Don't touch that abominable stuff!" like he did with other foods. Jesus even compared the Kingdom of Heaven to yeast that a woman works into flour so that it all rises (Matt 13:21). Leavened bread is common. Unleavened bread is uncommon. Having yeast everywhere around your home is common - it's almost impossible to get rid of, considering it exists even on the skin of grapes. Cleaning it out is uncommon. Isolating yeast might be the biggest Egyptian contribution to modern society; considering God has used the idea of "coming out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery" as a reminder for what it means to come out of the world and into his Kingdom, having him command his people to clean the yeast out of their houses makes perfect sense. He didn't want his people to be without yeast completely, but he certainly wanted them to pay attention to what it means to be common and have sin inside you; and then to become uncommon and have the sin removed. And that's why it's still worthwhile to celebrate the enacting of the New Covenant by remembering God's use of leavened and unleavened bread to show us how he thinks. Yesterday we planted the first piece of landscaping we've added to our new yard.
It's not much to look at right now: a little tiny stick with a few roots at one end. Roots which are now buried in soil so all you can see is the stick. If it weren't for a small piece of paper labeling the stick, no one would have any incentive to drop it in the ground at all, let alone take the care I took of it. It would probably wind up at the curb with all the other winter tree debris we've cleaned out of the yard in the past weeks. It's not even close to the biggest branch we've got. But that piece of paper is really important. It names the tree and tells us where it comes from, and that makes all the difference between it and the bundled-up rogue saplings waiting for the garbage truck. The label says "Peach Tree, Dwarf 'Contender'". Where you come from and what you are is important. In this case, the tree was specially chosen as a gift with our yard in mind. It's a dwarf tree, meaning it'll never get much bigger than 8 or 10 feet tall - it'll fit in a nice neat corner without hitting the overhead power lines. It's especially cold hardy and resists frosts well, an important attribute for a fruit tree in a Michigan climate. It bears a lot of fruit for a little tree, medium-to-large sized freestone peaches with golden un-streaked flesh (Red Havens, another favorite, have red streaks in the flesh of the peaches - these apparently do not). Freestone peaches are great because it's easy to can or bake with them while the non-freestone variety are really only good for eating fresh - and what would be the good of having a whole fruit tree you can't make pies from or preserve the fruit for later in the winter? How do I know all these things about this featureless chopped-off stick I buried in the ground yesterday? It's simple: the stick has a name and the name means something. It's a heritage, a prediction...a prophecy of sorts. It allows me to know all these things about what this apparently dead and useless little stick could become if cared for properly, because this little stick will take on all the attributes of the parent tree it came from. Literally came from, because it's a grafted tree. A small piece of a mature tree was cut off and spliced into the root system of a hardier tree so the result would be an exact replica of the parent, with no deviations that sometimes come from reproducing a plant by it's seeds. It's a clone of the mature tree it came from. This is why I've always found gardening such a fascinating thing to do. The parallels between plants and people are numerous, obvious, and amazing. Take our little sapling, for example. It's like a newborn baby. All newborn babies look very much the same. It's pretty hard to tell what features and characteristics they're going to display as adults; and if you didn't know what an adult Human looks like or is capable of, you probably would be pretty shocked by the potential wrapped up in the wrinkled, weak, red little body that is your average newborn. When I see a newborn, I have the same weakness anyone else does for this small helpless person; but what I see in them is not so much the value they have right this moment (because to be honest, they really don't have a lot of value as newborns) but the potential of what they are going to become. This tiny baby girl is someone's grandmother. That miniature baby boy is a really only a few years away from being a wise man who will care for an entire family. When you're raising and training a baby, you're doing so because you have an eye on the kind of tree they are and the kind of fruit you fully intend to harvest as soon as he or she is mature enough. Our peach tree won't even start bearing fruit for another five years, but I'll be caring for it very particularly even when it doesn't show a single peach year after year: because I know someday, given enough time and water and fertilizer and judicious pruning, it will. Because it's a peach tree and that's what peach trees do. A child is the same way. You raise them with great care even when they only show hints of the men or women they're going to become, because you know that even though this little one-year-old can barely walk, someday they'll be strong enough to be supporting you. That's what people do. So that's why we're excited about our not-very-exciting stick marooned out in the corner of the back yard: because someday we expect to be harvesting peaches from it, no matter how unlikely that may seem at the moment. And that will be pretty special. Our Big Computer Project is going live tomorrow. It's a private website, so I can't send anyone there...but for those customers it was intended for, it will be accepting real registrations and orders. This is a pretty major accomplishment.
Looking back, in some ways I find it hard to believe we've only been working on it for only a couple of months: to put it in perspective, we began work on it right before our wedding (we were glad there was a break in the action long enough to give us a week off right after our wedding with only minor pangs of conscience). We realized we were expecting Joshua right in the middle of a very busy week in which we were spending all day at the office and then visiting with Grandma every evening so we could learn how to do important things like transfer her from bed to chair and back. The week we lost Joshua was probably the worst week Ben could've been tied up going to doctor's appointments and staying up all night at the hospital because there was a big deadline the next week that a lot of stuff needed to be finished for. All in all, it appears to have been successful, though. In a nutshell, the project was to build a customized shopping cart - inserting products in the database and all - for a very large company to send it's contractors to do purchasing for their construction projects. Originally, Ben was supposed to find a coder who could do a lot of the programming work on the shopping cart since Ben had never built anything like it; but as time passed and deadlines loomed and there was no one applying for the position, Ben began learning the skills needed himself. We discussed it a lot and realized that by the time Ben interviewed and found someone for the position, that person would then need to be brought up to speed on what was needed and integrated into the project. In that same amount of time, Ben could learn and implement what needed to be done to build the cart himself - giving him a new skill that could then be turned around and used for other customers interested in a similar feature on their websites. So rather than giving the work away to someone else nominally working under him, Ben took on the work himself. I'm very proud of him, because every time a problem came up where the customer wanted some odd and unusual feature that Ben had never had any experience building before, he figured out what to do to take care of it and make the website work. I'm also proud of him for displaying his usual calm spirit when other people were panicking and sometimes making unreasonable demands. There was one conversation where if it'd been me instead of Ben involved, I would've been very tempted to tell the individual involved to go away and let people who knew what they were doing handle the situation. To listen to Ben's response, you'd never know the other person was being unreasonable, foolish, and unnecessarily harsh. When I'm actually in a conversation like that I'm much more diplomatic than when I'm on the sidelines listening to someone berate my husband for doing something much wiser than what the berator wants done. At any rate, the next few weeks will probably be full of lots of little (and maybe not-so-little) fire-stamping activities, but the initial big part of the job is now successfully done. Did I mention that I'm very proud of my wonderful husband? |
Author: LaurenWife of Benjamin and mother to two wonderful little girls who are getting bigger every day. Enjoys writing down thoughts and discussions we are having within the family and sharing them with whoever is interested in reading. CommentPlease don't be shy! If you're reading the blog updates, we'd like to hear what you think. Click on the "comments" link to send us a note.
Archives
August 2018
Categories
All
|