The Eye of the Storm.

All the feelings.  I (Jenna) don't know where to start.

Today, I got home from work to find two giant cardboard boxes sitting, soaking wet, in the pouring rain.  What did they hold?  Only 1,000 precious little CD babies of our new album.  After lugging them inside and facing the immediate dilemma of "I need to get these out of the cardboard mush ASAP before moisture gets into the CD packagings" and "Chris is not home.  I cannot open these album boxes without him.  That would be wrong..." I compromised by putting them up on their sides, opening the soggy tops & bottoms, and clawing a few smaller box corners open to let air in.  Or something.

 (Chris then got home.  And we opened them.  They look ok.  The peasants rejoiced.)

First order of business?  Open one up and start playing it, because something could have happened to the master we sent and the songs could be in the wrong order or there could be terrible sounds or something could cut off too soon.  (No, I don't have anxiety or trust issues. Obvi.)

(P.S.  The CDs work just fine.  Praise the Lord.)

So, as we started to take on other tasks while keeping an ear in the background to make sure Track 5 is indeed Track 5, I hopped on Facebook, like any good inefficient user of time.  Scrolling through the newsfeed (I gave that up for Lent this year.  I'm allowed to look now.  Often, it doesn't bring me enough joy to warrant how much I do it.  Go figure.), I saw this blogpost that a friend shared.  It has been raining for days, and flooding is starting to plague our area.  This is moments after seeing news reports of the wave of tornadoes that hit the south.  Truthfully, I haven't read much about it to this point.  I've maybe been slightly distracted by other things.

But I read this post.  The writer tells of being near the tornadoes, how the giant EF5 tornado hit the street they had just moved away from, and how her dear friend had just moved TO that area.  She writes about their frantic search for their friends and their children.  I will not do the author injustice by badly summarizing the ending and aftermath of their search.  But it talks of both incredible anger at God at loss of life and His apparent "plans," and of incredible faith that is not shaken even by the deepest grief - indeed, what is likely my greatest, deep-seated fear.

As I journeyed through those words, our album got to the song "Night."  It is a song about desperately trying to cling to hope when everything seems dark.  The chorus sings:

"Promise when all is said and done You'll be true
And that You're gonna make all things new."

My eyes did not stay dry.  This world is broken.  This is NOT how things were meant to be - homes being wiped clean from their foundations, children being taken, losing everything we hold dear.  Can everything really be made new??

...That's just it, isn't it?  It depends what we hold dear.  If it is things on this earth, then yes, we can lose everything.  But if it is something Deeper, something Greater, than it is impossible to lose everything.

The next song continued, "Far Beyond."  It was like I was hearing it with fresh ears, someone who hadn't played a part in its creation but just an earnest listener.

"Two things that I trust you will restore - 
The world, and my ever-broken heart;
knowing that I'll count them all the more
Beautiful for having once been torn apart."

The tears continued.  Is it really possible that one day this earth will be fully redeemed?  That in its radiance, every tear and woe from this life will make the new life that much more glorious?  Sometimes it seems too much to dare to hope... and then, at the same time, it seems too much NOT to trust it.  The pain we feel here is not the end of the story.  It is not meaningless.

I am grateful.  Grateful for an album that is complete and sitting here in our living room.  Grateful that as lightning crashes outside and rain pelts our walls, we are dry inside them.  Grateful that this album is not merely a business or a marketing venture - it is timid, firm Hope, in song form.  Grateful that technology can be used to help us rally around those who are despairing and struck down, however far away they might be.  And grateful for the sobering reminder that every last bit of our life could blow away tonight, yet we would still have more than we ever could have imagined for ourselves.

Again, the blogpost about The Cheerleader (the faithful) is here.  
And you can support the surviving family here.

-Jenna

2013 - The Final Moments

We have arrived.

On our first Tuesday work day of January 2013, we went to an Indian/Mexican combo restaurant (weird, right?) in our town with a notebook and pen to set some goals for the year.  Included in our conversation was an attempt at a timeline for our then-imaginary album.  It looked like this:

It felt like we'd already made progress, and made the "How on earth do we do this again?!" feeling shrink for a day or three. 

That day feels like it happened in another era.  Two dreamers, eager to be a "real" band, embarking on a voyage on a very misty morning, where all we could see were a few feet of waves in front of the dock and no hint of land on the other side.  And here we are, a year later, with so many miles sailed that the shore we left is but a memory now.

Realistically, our time frame got adjusted several times, which was to be expected.  The April scratches (= a basic version of the song everyone can listen to while they record their actual parts on the song in the studio) became more like demo versions, trying to pass ideas around friends and colleagues to embody the little souls in each song.  We played our last C&J shows in May/June so we could buckle down and focus on the record.  Summer saw the scratches created, changed, and finished, with the help of musicians around us. 

August finally brought the beginning of the recording process itself.  First, the drummer laid down the foundations in the beginning of the month.  Then, the day we packed our ideas and clothes into the Civic and drove the 15+ hours to Port St Lucie, FL (note to selves: next time, do not go NEAR 95 south on the last Saturday of summer vacation, as everyone in the vicinity of VA will be doing the same thing to get to Virginia Beach).  We spent a week pouring every ounce of energy (and our blessed, saintly engineer's energy) into a tiny vocal booth, running into the wee hours of the morning and sustained only by the Lord, Mama Douglas's cooking (best. host. ever.), banana-peanut butter wraps, and Throat Coat tea.  Definitely mostly the Lord.  When the week was through, we hopped back in the car, drove straight through to Maryland, and woke up to our day jobs (Jenna's return to teaching from summer break!) the next morning.  We also managed to drag ourselves out to dinner to celebrate Chris's birthday that day!

Geoff (both guitarist and engineer) began work laying down guitar tracks as we worked on piano ideas.  Then, on September 10th, we got word that our dream mixing engineer had time to squeeze in a lil' ol' band like us in about a month.  Cue SUDDENLY RECORDING THE REST OF THE ALBUM ASAP.  We grabbed our bassist and our programming writer (also the drummer) and set up a makeshift studio in our church to track bass and piano parts.  As soon as we finished, we sent the tracks down to Geoff in Florida so he could get them edited and ready for mixing. 

We also realized that, if we wanted the album mixed and mastered properly like we'd been hoping, we needed to start our Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, like, yesterday.  Chris put footage together and we launched the campaign to raise the rest of the funds we needed to make this step of the project happen.  We were able to set our goal comparably small to our entire budget, thanks to many private backers and donors who believe in this ministry and have partnered with us along the way.

At the end of October, Shane D. Wilson started work mixing our tracks.  We got the first 2 tracks two days later, went out and bought a pair of quality speakers so we could actually hear them, sat at our desk in our music work room... and listened with our mouths open, eyes shining, silent.  Until they finished, and we giggled like giddy schoolchildren.  We could not BELIEVE the quality he was bringing to our songs.  That week and the next were spent listening on as many sets of speakers as we could, taking notes, sending small requests for changes (and they were indeed few!), and listening more. 

In the process of this, we had been communicating with our mastering engineer, Matthew Odmark, since early October.  (We may have geeked out slightly when we realized he's a member of Jars of Clay.  Maybe.)  He received all of the mixed files in November so he could master the album for us... at which point he needed the name of the album and track listing.  Which we had spent approximately 15 seconds thinking about to date.  So, we spent a slightly crazed evening creating every possible mutation of an order for the 10 songs until we finally agreed that we'd found it. 

Chris works in many lists and doodles. 

Jenna works in sticky notes rearranged many ways.

Matthew mastered the album for us, we gave him a few tiny requests, and he finished it off.  Whew.

After 2 1/2 whirlwind months of much faster progress than we expected, December became a month of working on album artwork and building a new band website to help us reach more people when we release the album.  December also became a month of holiday crazy times, so progress has seemed more snail-like compared with the preceding months.

But, here we are, on the very last day of the year.  We have a tiny piece of notebook paper to look back on, where we took our best guesses at setting goals for how we could expect an album to develop.  And now, we could listen to the mastered version on a set of car speakers as we drove home on Christmas Eve, tearing up at the marvel of what has been created.  Not that we or the album itself are so wondrous - only that God can breathe His creative spirit into community and can birth something that seems impossible to two small people in northern Maryland.

We are tired.  We are proud.  We are humbled.  2013, you have been a challenging and stretching year.  We are grateful for it.  We look forward to completing the rest of the artwork, website, PR work, and distribution necessary in early 2014 to finally give this album flight, and then to plunging back into shows where we can do what we love: playing music together and hopefully ministering to people in small ways.

Blessings to you in 2014.  Could not say it better than this:

This is attributed to Brad Paisley.  But the image that had his name also had an incorrectly placed comma after the word "Tomorrow."  I will not abide such things.

Kickstart the New CHRIS & JENNA Album!

Well, everyone, here's our life right now!  We are amazed at how much support the project has drawn in such a short amount of time.  If you're down with what we're doing, spread the word to those you know - help us make this album happen!! 
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/696318513/new-chris-and-jenna-album

The illusion (maybe?) of "balance" in the battle for our days.

Readers, I come to you pretty undecided about this one.  So, I'm asking for your input.

 My brain right now.  In work + album mode.  Never.  Off.

We have seasons of life that demand different things of us, and seasons where we take different nuggets that we apply to the way we live.

In college, I learned what it means to overextend yourself to the point where you can do everything "well enough," but not really excelling or thriving.  To do everything simply because you can, and thus compromise sleep and relationships.  In the last semester of college, I gained freedom by finally saying "no" and quitting some things (gasp).  I was able to pour into people in ways I had not, and I felt more alive than when I was constantly doing work, hitting the pillow so late I couldn't even tell what time it was, and cramming more into my days than most would think possible.  I finally learned that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

I am a nightowl by nature.  It has taken me a while to get to a point where I can acknowledge that my mornings and days at my job are better when I go to bed sooner.  Sounds obvious, but it's totally opposite to my instincts.  So, at 29, I was finally going to bed at a slightly more reasonable hour in order to wake up and get to my job on time (ish).

But now, we are in album mode.  And for several weeks straight, we have gone to our day jobs, then straight to our recording site or home, eaten a quick (unhealthy) dinner, and plugged away until midnight-ish.  And then we wake up and do it all over again.

This is me when I think about my impending 1 am bedtime. But less of the athleticness.  Also less of the sculpted thighs.

(This is also me each morning when I show one of my kindergarteners an M and he enthusiastically says "T!"  No. This is an M.  It is the first letter in your name.  Just like it was yesterday.  And three weeks ago.  For the love.  I could write a whole separate blog... kindergarten teachers everywhere, you have my undying respect and loyalty.  This stuff is nuts.)

The going-to-bed-more-reasonably-and-pretending-I'm-a-responsible-adult part of me wants to die a little.  Ok, maybe more than a little.

But it's only part of me.  Because the other part of me that knows what our studio engineer/guitarist lives like, doing these crazy hours just about all the time, and how when he's questioned about his stamina/fatigue only points back to the Lord - that part of me is using him as a muse to get through it and questioning my approach to life.

I'm caught between the idea of rest, which God created, and "pressing on toward the goal" by going to bed when everything is done, not when I'm tired.

I definitely can examine what is unnecessary, what is wasteful, what fills my time but does nothing for the Kingdom, what someone else could do just as well if not better than me.  So, I know it's not helpful to fill time with superfluous things.

But what about when it's not superfluous?  What about when it's all related to things you feel called to do and things you don't feel like you have a choice about?

 Dude.  Gravity sculpture - no glue, no cement, no nothing.  I'm impressed.

I think "balance" is a common word in Christian circles.  We don't want people burned out on ministry, we get overwhelmed with our schedules, and we ask for prayer to help us get a better balance of quality time with our spouses, with children, with friends, with God, with ministries, with chores..... etc.

I feel like this is an art I have tried to learn through the past 5 years or so... and yet, Jesus doesn't talk about balance.  Ever.  Jesus talks about selling ALL you have and giving it to the poor, of a widow who gave all she had to the church, of a man who finds a treasure and sells all of his belongings to buy the field it's hidden in...  Jesus does go away from the crowds to pray, to be restored by his Father.  But those accounts are outnumbered by all of his healings, teachings, and traveling from place to place to love people and show them the way to Life.

And Paul?!  I'm fairly certain Paul wasn't refraining from traveling, writing his letters, speaking our in his jail cell because he needed some "me time."  And countless people are working tiring hours both here and overseas to reach people with the good news of Jesus and to fight for justice.  But we're told that we need to stay healthy with how we spend our time.  We're told "you can't be all things to all people."  Yet Paul says, "I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some."  Which is it?!

So, where do we come to rest in this?  This divide between creating limits to care for ourselves so that we can care for others in the name of the gospel, and "keeping on" through our exhaustion for the sake of the gospel? 

I know I can think of a few central principles:
-Relying on God for strength and sustenance
-Having time with the Lord for refreshment
-Doing all things for the sake of the gospel, and no other motivations (selfishness, approval...)

Yet I'm falling short in some of the way these are lived out.  Is constantly pushing beyond limits a foolish practice that will leave us ragged and spent and keep us from our full potential?  Or is conserving and protecting simply an American approach to our lives and our faith?

What do you think?  Where are you in this??

Album Progress: the things we must learn to love.

"More frequent summer blogging," I wrote in our last blog post.  In June.  So much for that.  I suppose it's still technically summer, but my school year has started, so it's hard to feel that way!  But I thought about blogging, with warm fuzzy feelings and all, a whole bunch of times.  So, there's that. 

We have returned from a week of recording vocals in Florida!  We tracked at The Prayer Closet Studios with Geoff Douglas of Equilateral Services (and a musician in his own right).  Our good friend JD Lenick is triple-threat-ing our album with drums, percussion, and some killer backing tracks to fill out the depth and sounds on these tunes.  We arrived in Port St. Lucie on a Sunday and got to catch the tail end of the drum tracks being recorded.  Beginning Monday afternoon, we traded off the vocal booth all week long, fighting to complete a long list of things in one tiny week.

 

 VICTORY!  Major AND minor vocal parts finished = brief Sabbath rest on the beach!

 

We have musician friends who seem to record all the time.  Every time we talk to them, they're making a new EP or a new single.  Most of them also have connections that help them do this... but regardless, recording this album, for us, just does not feel like whistling and skipping into a studio to gaily throw down our song as rainbows and butterflies appear.  It feels like hard labor.  It is a labor of love, but definitely labor.  We love to play together, and we love connecting with people at our shows.  We do not always love getting really particular about our craft. 

A while back, I saw this Proverb posted by a fellow musician (Mathai - she was on The Voice a few seasons ago, and I've enjoyed learning more about her) on Twitter:

Boyyyyyyyyyyyy it stopped me in my tracks.  She said it was "God slapping me in the face - no better wake up call."  Me too.  The road to recording this album has felt like one big training course in this very thing. 

I grew up as, so I was told, a really smart kid.  They tested me in third grade and put me in the gifted and talented program at my school.  I remained in it all the way through high school.  I experienced a lot of literature, projects, and problem-based learning that I would not have otherwise.  It gave me a bit of an identity, and gave me some peers I could commiserate with (or compete with, depending on the day).  So, then I went to college and was in the honors program there.  Again, I was made to think and use my brain.  All of these were valuable experiences, and I would not go back and undo any of them.  But at the end of the day, here are some things I think I really learned in those 12-ish, formative years:

::enter the voices inside Jenna's head, circa 2006, some known, most subconscious and unrealized...::

-Things come easily to me for the most part.  This is how people recognize me.  This is where my identity lies.
-If something doesn't come easily, it doesn't feel natural or fit with my identity.  People will look at me strangely.  I will avoid those things when possible.
-Criticizing me suggests that my smart kid, capable, quick to learn identity is no longer true.  Which means I don't know who I am.  So I crumble.  (it also all sounds like yelling to me, which terrifies me, but that's another story...)
-My dad, and many of my peers, define my intelligence by my grades. Anything below a 97 is going to raise an eyebrow.  Gifted kids aren't supposed to get less than that.   (this was helpfully dismantled a bit in college)
-...luckily, I can get really good grades by cramming the night before a test/paper/evaluation.  I probably won't remember the information later or be able to use or apply what I learned, but I got my grade.  No questions asked.
-I am labeled as "gifted," so I can get special privileges, like leaving other classes to work on projects and extensions on papers because I "need them."  So I can make up excuses when I procrastinate and people will generally make an exception for me.  I usually make 'last minute' work out pretty well.

::end the parade of half-truths::

Now... apply all of that to being an adult musician.  People tell me I am good at singing.  I have been singing forever, so I can do it - to a point - without thinking.  So, focused, technical practice is not first thing on my mind.  My mom does not live with me, and so does not force me to practice like she did with my clarinet.  I do not have tests to pass.  So, there are not deadlines for me to achieve certain levels of mastery with my craft.  I have a limited amount of piano, glockenspiel, and ukulele skill.  Trying to do certain things with them does not feel natural to me.  So, when they get hard, I push them away and do something else. 

What's missing is a healthy dose of work ethic.  Weird, since I worked my butt off to make sure I kept the grades and the appearances I felt I needed to...  but somewhere at the end of college, I crashed, and all desire to work at things was gone.  (Maybe it was that being good at things was what my whole identity was based on and I couldn't keep up anymore?  ..nah.....)

Somewhere in the sifting of education and cultivation, I missed the boat of intrinsic motivation and the constant pursuit of excellence.  Instead of seeing whatever abilities I had as a tool to be used, I saw them as the point of it all.  So being smart was the end goal, not being able to use my mind to accomplish great things.  So, here I sit, a closer-to-30-than-seems-possible adult, who loves music and feels a convicting calling to pursue it and use it for God's glory, who also instinctually runs away the second it gets hard.  Who bristles when her husband bandmate corrects her.  Who balls up on the couch and shuts down when she feels incompetent.  Who avoids even starting practicing because she has a sneaking suspicion she might actually be bad at it, and she never learned how to deal with being bad at things.

"To learn, you must love discipline.  It is stupid to hate correction." 

Ouch. 

This grown-up is having to slowly, painfully learn what many of her elementary students have already grasped - that learning is not always about a brief pat on the back, but about the development itself.  That it's supposed to feel awkward and uncomfortable for a while.  That having your inefficiencies pointed out is desirable, because it gives you a chance to seize them with determined joy and grow.  That doing something well "effortlessly" is a facade, because true skill is backed by a ton of discipline.  And learning to love that discipline can result in art that is beautiful and solid, not threatened by a lack of work or too much criticism.

To read more about the history of whom this quote is attributed to, go here.

To read the disturbing but memorable cartoon of what made me remember to say "whom" instead of "who," go here.

The original version of this quote, when I first read it, said "...miss two days, my friends know it."  Which, to me, is much more accountability-inspiring than thinking about critics.  The point is the same - and this is a kind of personal drive I have not known in my past, but I see it in friends of mine, and I aspire to honor the gifts God has given me with the same kind of zeal. 

...I started this post meaning to tell you specific details of what recording has been like so far.  I didn't quite know it would go this direction.  But, here it is.  The good news is I am writing to you in a reflective place: not the first realization of my faults, but standing in the middle of a massive project that has SO much potential, looking at the growth in these past months of willingness to listen, to refine, to practice, to struggle.  This album is indeed a labor of love, and I am so grateful for it.  I am grateful for the chance to learn to be a laborer, who puts the kind of work in that will make the harvest worth it. 

Much love,
Jenna

Back In the Saddle Again

So, my New Year's Resolution said that I'd write at least one blog post every month.  That lasted until April.  May was nonexistent.  But I wrote a bunch throughout Lent, so maybe that counts?  Or something?  Regardless, it's June, school's out, and I'm back.

To start us out for some (hopefully) more frequent summer blogging, a little insight into our hearts and passion right now.  We are creating our second album.  And we adore the tiny, fledgling fetus it is right now.  It will be our surrogate child for a while.  We are rather emotionally invested in it, which causes absolutely NO communication break downs or failures, in case you were wondering.  It also causes virtually NO stress about timelines, deadlines, skill, money........  ahem.

While these pesky human emotions and insecurities can indeed get in the way, we have something too important to get blocked and tramped down.  Chris, in a moment of clarity when we started to hit a wall one night, had us stop and begin writing a bit of mission/vision casting for this album.  In other words, why bother?  Why record these songs?  Below are snippets taken from these pieces of cardstock that we covered in various Sharpie colors, furiously attempting to translate our inner thoughts and desires to a set of visible and understandable characters on a page.

"There is an urgency in my heart for these truths. Clearly they've been said before, in very many ways. But this world hurts. It bleeds, groans, shakes, and mourns for something it long forgot, something Unnamed and ignored. But truly, it has a Name. A Heartbeat. A Face. A Voice. A Rhythm. A Disarming Force that in a breath can crumble every lie. And that is the pull of this album for me – there is Hope beyond what we've been fooled into swallowing. Far off, yet so near. A day unknown, yet this very moment. I want it to be a vessel the Spirit can reach right through and grab someone's heart. To still, to quiet, to awaken, to lead, to embolden...  A story of raw brokenness being transformed into freedom.

...

It is sure to unleash my insecurities – being able to play the instruments well enough, not understanding the process, being wrong, making mistakes... I want God to intervene for me and get me out of the darn way. Truly, I want this to be the start of a new chapter for C&J, and I'm not sure of all the pages (or any of them!)... but I want us to love people and to be instruments used as much as possible." 

  

"...God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering. Though musically a departure, it does feel like the spiritual successor to How the Fall Makes You Feel. The world is still a mess, but now we're not looking down at our feet, we're looking to the promise of God of resurrection through Jesus, of the righting of wrongs, of the redemption of mankind.

We look to that promise though it is still out of our reach and control. We wait for it patiently, hoping in the trueness of God's promise. While we wait, and the night stretches on, we ask God to lead us until the promise is fulfilled, until our faith is sight. We hold to His words, knowing that remaining faithful to Him takes, at the same time, all that we have, as well as what we lack. These songs, to me, communicate life from the no man's land. The time between the fall of man and Jesus' return. These songs are the cry of our hearts that in the midst of the battle, You would still be making us fruitful, making us more like You. They're songs written by people who are in these lands of suffering, for people in the lands of suffering. 

 

Artistically, my desire for the project's creation is that it would be joyous. Though personally, these songs mean the world to me, that's a huge burden to place on a recording. I don't want it to be so weighty that I feel as if my soul is at risk with every drum fill I don't love, or vocal take I botch. I think these songs could truly serve people, but not if we don't love playing them. Not if we're counting on them to make us rich, or build our fan base. I want to bring the wisdom of experience into the studio, for sure, but I don't want to bring in my baggage or jadedness. I'd rather count my blessings that God has allowed this vision to progress as much as it has. I'd rather serve in the creation of art than create art that will serve me.

...

So why this album? Why these songs? Why these people? Really, I can guess and reason, but at the end of the day, something in me says 'to make music.' I can't shake it from me anymore than I can unravel my skin. I thank God for the clarity and burden of a purpose. For “life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague desire. A boat yearning for the sea, yet afraid.” But it is my hope to make music that testifies to the mercy of God. I am thankful that God hasn't handed these dreams over to us, for a hope that we can see is no hope at all. I hope to always be working towards using art to shine light onto fragments of God's truth, and to not have too much, and thus be content, and forget what it is I'd set out to do at the start."

And so, we press on.  Glory to the One who is deserving!

Lenten Fast 2013: The End

What wondrous love is this, oh, my soul, oh, my soul

What wondrous love is this, oh, my soul

What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul

Happy Easter!!!  On this day of resurrection, fasting ends.  Okay, some people say it ends earlier in Holy Week, but we surely did not need groceries before today.

So, at the tail end, here's a picture of The List:

 43 different items left, down from 70-something.  Still looks huge, no?

And here's the state of our cupboard:

 We can see the back of it.  And move things around easily.  This is progress.

Definitely emptier than the onset!  And yet, not as bare-bones as one might think after 40 days of trying to deplete it.  I still am convinced that our kitchen's food supply does NOT vary greatly from the majority of middle-class Americans, so I don't think we can only point the blame on Chris & Jenna's unique splurging lives and dismiss us as hoarders.

Since the last update, here are things I've observed in a fast of eating what we have instead of constantly accumulating more (with the only additions of milk and fresh produce):

Planning ahead is key, especially with the life we lead.  We hit a Wednesday night where we were leading worship for a college group and had to be there by 6:15-ish.  Chris gets home at 5:30, and I had an appointment or work stuff or something that prevented me from getting home early.  So we had a 45 minute window in which to load up our gear, print the set list and a few chord charts, and eat.  We had food to spare in the The Cupboard, but no time to prepare it.  So Subway got our dollar.  Had we been on it the day before, we wouldn't have had to indulge in convenient but pricier fast food.

We don't miss much.  It's so exciting to have a fridge full of healthy greens and blackberries ($1.29 at Aldi. Can't get over it.) that it's hard to feel lacking.  I will admit a few things I'm looking forward to come Monday: coffee creamer (been doing skim milk - just not the same, but I have lived), yogurt (have found a lot of yummy looking smoothie recipes that are begging for it), and maple syrup (we were out for months before Lent started, but now that we're actually using the pancake mix and searching out more consistent breakfast recipes, I am missing it.  Though this morning I discovered the joy of peach butter on pancakes.  I have no regrets.).  Chris has been nursing the last of the peanut butter for weeks, and I'm sure he can't wait for a fresh jar (any normal human would have consumed or tossed the half ounce that's left, but not this man).  Almond milk will be a welcome friend, too, and I bet Chris will be happy to replenish our chicken supply.  But really, that's about it.

We have had things for almost 2 years that we did not know existed and would have never eaten.  We had - count them - THREE packs of hot dogs in the freezer.  One of them was open.  Would we have ever made them?  Probably not.  (I'm not saying they were 2 years old - the ones we made tasted fine - don't judge.)  They became a joke item on my part, offering them to Chris as a dinner option, knowing he'd never want them.  How appalling.  We have also had a shake-and-pour Bisquick pancake mix for forEVER.  Maundy Thursday morning, it finally saw the light of day.  Why did we have this?!
In related news, I just saw something about making sure to discard any cake or pancake mixes that are past the expiration date b/c the yeast can grow spores, turn to toxic mold, and kill you dead.  ...We're still alive.  Hmm.

Muffin pans are breakfast-to-go's best friend.  Did you know that old fashioned oatmeal can be used for more than a yearly batch of oatmeal scotchies?!   Weird, right??  ...nope, just me?  Ahem...  I found this recipe for Baked Honey Oatmeal made in a muffin pan so that your servings are ready-to-go, and with it and some variations, we have had delicious HEALTHY breakfast every morning that we can grab, microwave for a minute, and eat in the car on the way to work.  (If you look up "morning people" in the dictionary/thesaurus, we will be listed under Antonyms.  "Creating" breakfast before 8 am is not humanly possible in our home.)  I'd like to thank our stoneware muffin pans - just spray with cooking spray, and no paper liner needed.

I want to eat healthier.  Only being allowed to buy fresh food makes me feel a lot better.  I'm not sure exactly what we were buying before that distracted us from this... which is likely the problem.  When there's too much junk in your life, you don't really know what any of it is, and yet you can't see the better things you're missing out on. 

Traveling on this fast is harder.  We had no restrictions on eating out.  We had to go away for 2 weekends this month.  Normally, I get us a big thing of trail mix, some beef jerky, and some cheese crackers and/or dried fruit for travel munchies - clearly within the milk/produce boundaries, though perhaps dried fruit could have been swung.  We could have stocked up on non-refrigerated fruit for snacks for this trip, like apples and bananas... But, we didn't.  So, we wound up spending much more on food on the road, and a lot of it was not very good for us.  Note to self: again, plan ahead, and think outside the box of routine.

There is always more than meets the eye.  Especially toward the end, I saw a lot of ingredients that didn't really fit together and was prepared to just eat pasta with olive oil and veggies for days.  Yet, Chris saw elk chili.  (And it was scrumptious.)  Typical of the "there's nothing to eat!" plague of the household with full cabinets, there was always something more available if we thought about it hard and got creative enough.

We have thoughtful, sweet friends.  Kira kept us (me) functioning with the gift of a can of unground coffee she wasn't using.  We don't have a coffee grinder... but a few weeks ago we had the light-dawning realization that a Magic Bullet could probably grind coffee just fine for two people who love it but are not coffee snobs by any stretch of the imagination.  (I have gone a step up that ladder by becoming obsessed with Furnace Hills Coffee, which is from a local roastery and may be a few bucks more, but employs special needs folks, uses fair trade coffee, and supports orphanages in Ukraine and development in Asia - um, YES.)  Jenn read my whining post about the Williams Sonoma hot chocolate and brought us fancy Twinings Drinking Chocolate - virtually the same thing - that she'd had and wasn't using.  Did we need these things?  No, but these women saw a need and wanted to fill it - fabulously, with things they already owned and acknowledged that they didn't need to keep, instead of buying us something.  (Coincidentally, have I touched the hot chocolate yet?  I'll let you take a wild guess...)

Gluttony is real.  We don't talk about it much in America.  We talk about obesity, we talk about health, we talk about food labels and companies and recipes and trends... but I think I'm realizing how deep gluttony has gripped our country (which is why we don't talk about it).  The urge to collect and consume constricts our hearts and blinds us to what we're really doing and to the needs of the people not only across oceans, but down the street.   I heard a group of high schoolers talking about Catholicism and the 7 deadly sins, and gluttony was one of the last they remembered as they tried to list them.  I don't know about you, but when I think of it I get a cartoon image of an overweight person sloppily gathering food in his arms and shoving things in his mouth (before you think I'm a jerk, I think it's because of this cartoon series).  I don't think gluttony is usually this obvious.  Really, this is the sneaky genius of most sin - we picture an exaggerated worse-case scenario of it, separate our own actions from that image, conclude "I don't struggle with that," and carry on.  I think gluttony has joined hands with greed and stealthily tiptoed into my home and my heart with the goal of setting up shop for a good long time.  As their cover becomes more and more exposed, they revolt (see my previous mourning sessions/temper tantrums over hot chocolate and maple cream - ugh.) and kick and scream against the truth that I. want. for. nothing.

There are people in this town and little ones near and far who are starving today.  And this grips my heart and pulls my gut to help, yet is also met with almost immediate hopelessness of 'not really making a difference.'  We all know that people are starving, and many of us are willing to occasionally donate to organizations who will do something about it.  But we don't often connect the actual contents of our own cupboards to their need.  The old "There are kids starving in Africa, finish your plate!" gets met with "Are you going to mail them my uneaten Brussels sprouts?!"  What does THIS have to do with THEM??  What we physically have seems to be disconnected from others' needs, because it is ours and in our house.  

But really, in a way, we can send those unwanted sprouts to Africa.

We could keep close watch on what we spend on groceries.  We could give up items from our carts that are impulses or more than we need while we're at the store, total what we would have spent, and give that money to those who have none, therefore literally giving to them what would have been our excess.
We could keep track of how much we waste and then a) alter how much we buy and b) commit to giving the equivalent of our waste to those in need - if we're willing to spend it on filling a trash can, we should be willing to spend it on aching bellies that could be satisfied.
We could meal-plan to determine what we'll actually use in our cupboards for a week/month/fortnight and then raid our cupboards for (quality, non-expired) items that don't fit the list and take them to a local food bank, shelter, or other organization in need ('in need' being the key part - if they already have 84 cans of peas but no green beans, then giving them my nine additional cans of peas is not truly helpful).
We could.

If only we would.

Thinking and living like this requires much more intentional thought and action than what our culture tells us we should have to bear.  Much more than my instincts give me.  But on this day, we read that Jesus defeated death.  He showed that where something is dead, it can live again.  Where selfishness abounds, there can be rebirth.  Where hopelessness prevails, there is yet hope.  Where blindness drives our days, scales can fall from our eyes to let us see the glory that comes when we loosen our grip on our stuff and use it to provide for our neighbors, brothers, and sisters.

From this point on, our fast is over.  Thus, the danger of returning to our old habits and patterns.  Neither of us want this.  We will begin buying other food items again, but ingredients that will help us make meals out of what we already own, rather than replacing them and shoving them back to the deep recesses of The Cupboard to rot and decay.  We will try to shop focused on what we truly need, rather than what we could have.  Because:
Just because we CAN have it doesn't mean that we SHOULD. 
(the antithesis of the American dream, folks..... also restated liberally from Jen Hatmaker in her book, 7.)

This, much more than mindless consuming, will God-willing show us glimpses of what the Kingdom is supposed to be like.

And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on, I'll sing on

And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on

And when from death I'm free, I'll sing His love for me

And through eternity I'll sing on, I'll sing on

And through eternity I'll sing on