On becoming a domestic diva (which I most certainly am not)

When Justin and I first got married, I didn't know how to cook much more than a frozen dinner. I was intimidated just to set foot in a grocery store as the one with the primary responsibility for determining what we would eat. I may even have come close to hyperventilating a time or two. (I don't like to be bad at things, especially seemingly simple things like making a trip to the grocery store.)

Over the past few years, I have become much more confident in my cooking (and shopping) "skills." My appreciation for Pioneer Woman and my undying love for Tasty Kitchen should come as no surprise to anyone reading this right now. (Allrecipes, with a few recipe exceptions, is forever ruined for me.) One of the things I am most grateful to have figured out is knowing what I like to cook with on a regular basis. I still have a number of spices that I used once, four years ago. Yet despite the advances I have made, I am still quite inefficient with and significantly intimidated by meal planning. One of the reasons I love Tasty Kitchen is because Ree and the gals feature five recipes every weekday. I go there almost every day and add any recipes I really want to try. Viola. A substantial recipe base to consult whenever I choose. And while I have made several of those recipes, my "menu planning" is still nowhere near as consistent or convenient as I would like it to be.

I do have a point.

Here it is.

Ann Voskamp posted this link to (someone else's) 15 weeks of meal plans, and the meals themselves look pretty good. The website even includes printable shopping lists for each week. This isn't the first time I've been tempted to try something like this. However, I cannot overcome the one objection I have always encountered when contemplating taking the leap. I feel so constricted by using just one person's recipes! I know, I know. It should be so simple just to trade out a couple of recipes. But I literally feel physically unable to make that kind of commitment.

Hello. My name is Lisa. And I am a commitment phobic--at least where any kind of work, change, or especially work coupled with change is involved. I think.

This is where you come in, friends. Do you have any meal planning tips that work for you? Did you have this same irrational fear of committing to meal planning, but there was something you did that finally propelled you into slowly morphing into a meal planning pro? Can you tell me to stop being ridiculous, just use the dang meal plan, and swap out a recipe or two already? I feel like I'm a frozen newbie in the grocery store again. I need a good swift kick in the pants, or I will probably be frozen here for the rest of my life, paralyzed by too many options.

I'll let you know if I ever thaw out and get moving. Until then, I hope someone else finds the meal plan link helpful. Revel in your domestic diva-ness, and then try to telepathically transfer some of those vibes to me.

Sincerely,
Your domestically-challenged friend

I have a hobby!

This is only significant because it's been so long since I've taken up a new hobby. Well, there was the guitar a few years back, but that was short-lived, and I am still optimistic about picking it up again. At any rate, I've actually been learning a little bit about our new camera and playing around with it. Mostly, though, I've been exploring Photoshop Elements. Now, not only does Pioneer Woman supply me with a steady stream of yummy recipes, she has also become my tutor for all things photography. Just what I need, another reason to follow her blog obsessively! While she does have a number of tutorial posts, I haven't gotten around to most of those yet. Primarily, I have been using her free actions for PSE. I just love it when I don't have to learn every trick there is to Photoshop, and instead I can benefit from someone else's expertise! And I have still learned a couple of things from playing around with the actions too.

Here are a few of my favorites so far.

Suffocated by (false) hope

Before I get started on this post, I just want to say that I hope I didn't give the impression in my last post that "feeling more burdened than blessed" is a dominant state of mind. It certainly can be, but I didn't mean to imply that just because moms can feel a little overwhelmed at times, or frustrated because they are not feeling "blessed" by their children 24 hours a day, that feeling burdened dominates. I just started getting unsettled about my own wording and wanted to be sure I was clear on that. All I'm really trying to say is that God's most generous blessings do not always leave us feeling blessed. And that is not to say that they always leave us feeling burdened either! Capiche? I am probably just butchering my thoughts on this subject, so on to other things.

Actually, I lied. I'm sticking to the same subject. You know someone who's been feeling a little too much burden and a lot too little blessing these days? This gal right here. (I'm pointing to me.) Which is completely and utterly ridonculous because I live just about as much of a charmed life as I could possibly imagine.

I just read Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts, which was written because of a challenge to her to write down 1000 blessings. The importance of how we filter our lives with our thoughts and perspective is just so glaringly obvious. We have become so entitled as Americans. As a group, we just keep taking and taking and taking and always looking for more because none of it ever satisfies. And when we do that, we fail to recognize just how much we have been given and that God, who owes us nothing, is the gracious author of every last one of those good gifts. When we recognize his gifts, we can stop mindlessly consuming and start appreciating what we have.

My own selfishness stunned me a few weeks ago, and it continues to stun me. I met Justin before I ever had the desire to be married. And I almost literally have no idea how I wound up with someone so devoted to me and, even more than that, devoted to working to have a marriage that is pleasing to God. So I was stunned to step out of what has become this almost all consuming desire to have a child to realize just how all consuming it has become. If God chooses to keep our earthly family as just me and Justin, I am so blessed! I am so blessed to have him as my husband. And yet so many days feel more polluted by a desire for something I do not have than warmed by much deserved gratitude to God for all that I do have.

This is the first month in a while that I have had the opportunity to feel the all too familiar sensation of days and hours and minutes crawling by until I have answers for another month. The week I can take a pregnancy test. The week I simply cannot stop wondering: Will this be the month we can get on with our lives and that I can stop obsessing about becoming a mom? The week I begin waiting for a day that is not too early to take a test. The week I have been known to take as many as three tests. Because inevitably, the test comes back negative and then I reason that I must have taken it too early. So the questions, and the unquenchable ray of optimism, persist. This is my suffocation by hope.

But any hope that is suffocating is no hope at all. For God's word says, "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you" (Isa 26:3) and again, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil 4:6-7).

Jesus is our only real hope. He is the only unfailing hope. The only perfect hope. Hoping in anything else is foolishness. Even if the thing I hope in is good, it can never be good enough to replace God. Which is why hoping in anything else is sinful idolatry. And why that false hope leads to suffocation. Not perfect peace.

I pray that God uses this time in my life to teach me to put my hope in Christ, my rock and my redeemer, and to teach me to gratefully accept whatever gifts and whatever trials may come from his perfect hand. That is my prayer for me. And it is also my prayer for all of you. Maybe this will be the month I finally learn.