When is a pot not so lucky?

I went to the PTA pot luck last week. I had wanted to take meatballs. Not just any meatballs but the super yummy scrumptious ones that I had had last Christmas at the old church. I emailed the lady for the recipe and of course she didn't respond. That made me mad and sad and frustrated. Mad enough to the point that I said "the heck with it! I'm tired of the usual stuff at pot lucks anyways, lets eat something good!" So I made Asian lettuce wraps and they were super, yummy, scrumptious!

I don't really know pot lucks from my childhood. My memory is that we didn't really have people over for dinner. We had company from out of town that would come and stay for a few days usually on their way to or from another destination. My Mom would labour for days over the feasts to serve them and I'll write more about that some time later. Instead of pot lucks we went "visiting." I would like to write more about "visiting" however I'm having a heck of a time finding stuff on the Internet about it. I'm just not using the right magical combination of words for the search engine. Then I tried searching for "calling". Which was even worse and then to complicate those matters I looked for "calling cards" and you can't even begin to imagine the chaos I found.

I guess that pot lucks entered my life when I joined a church. In the young adult glory days is was often my pots and everyone else was in luck! But I do remember going to a few full fledged adult ones at some grandparentish friends and discovering grandpa Jack's chicken wings. I also remember being at one the Christmas I came back from Korea having one of grandma Jean's homemade peanut butter chocolate cups in each hand just in case there wasn't any more and because I had been deprived of them for so long.

Ahhhhhhhhhh pot lucks I have known. Or, as some people call them "pot blessings" because in some churches the word "luck" just isn't done. In his super yummy, scrumptious blog "Stuff Christians Like" (that I just can't get enough of!) Jonathan Acuff says this: "Luck is a more accurate description of the food you'll find at church events, where everyone brings their own dish. They're not all blessings some of them are gross. Upon tasting them your mouth does not think to itself, 'I have just been blessed.' It might think, 'Wow! I have just been cursed.' And now you've got a "pot cursing" on your hands, which seems like something a drunk crock pot would start doing if you bumped into it and spilled it's drink at a nightclub." //stuffchristianslike.net/2009/04/515-taking-a-sympathy-scoop-from-the-dish-no-one-eats-at-the-pot-luck/

I remember my first pot luck somewhere in Illinois, I felt like I was back in Korea with a whole array of unfamiliar dishes that I needed Huggyband to interpret for me. That was also the first time I'd encountered Red Velvet cake AKA "stuck pig cake." In Indiana I was pregnant and craving comfort food but after the first spread of covered and smothered goo that made me feel sick I learned to bring a green salad with dressing on the side so I'd at least have something I wanted to eat. In his "Rules for Pot luck" (more like a survival guide), Jeffry P. Barnes writes 4) If you are lucky enough to see a relish tray with uncooked veggies, take them. Do not worry about others having enough. Your survival is important and you must be ruthless. http://recipes.stsams.org/recipes/rulesforpotlucks.html


Totally off topic here but I just discovered some of the very old Saturday morning PSA's on youtube. You know the ones that you're STILL singing the songs to? Here's "Don't drown your food." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfEG15CLTqo My Nana insisted that the only reason cooks put gravy on their food was to cover up the bad taste of their cooking. All I can say is that if I were going to cover up bad food, white gravy would not be what I would pick to do it with! Brown gravy on the other hand only goes to enhance the flavor of already yummy things like poutine.

Anyways.......... Pot lucks in the south were very adventuresome and required A LOT of interpretation. The good stuff was very, very good. Little Miss Teen used to look forward so much to Miss Shelby's broccoli, cheese cornbread that we affectionately began to call church pot lucks "feast days." Except for the bad the bad stuff........... I once heard a man scold his daughter for not eating anything and when I glanced over at her plate and saw all those boiled greens I honestly couldn't blame her! Our favorite, "not our favorite" dish was white bread and watermelon or pineapple sandwiches. They were just as they sound, white bread, a slice of pineapple or watermelon and a lot of mayo. As Barnes writes, 2) Avoid potato salad, or anything else with mayo in it unless you have seen it come out of the refrigerator. Avoid it totally during hot weather.


Honestly I've probably been the bringer of more pot curses as I have the recipient. I'm a great cook but sometimes accidents do happen. Like the time I dusted a cake with cornstarch instead of icing sugar. There was also the time I made a great spinach salad. I thought it was great, everyone else thought it was great, except for my best friend, who, not knowing that I had brought it, took a bite and pronounced "WHAT IS WITH THIS SPINACH SALAD IT'S HORRIBLE!" And sometimes I've brought the dish that nobody eats. Some friends of mine recently talked about what foods "go" at a pot luck and what foods don't. We agreed that elaborately decorated cakes don't. This I learned at Christmas after spending a lot of time on a cake that I took to a pot luck and then brought back untouched. Good for my family; bad for my ego. I've been told that very gracious kitchen ladies will do the kind if not Christian thing when they see this happen and very discreetly throw half of the dish in the trash so it looks like it's been eaten to preserve face. I've also been told that pies "go." This is probably because homemade pies are rare these days so people tend to snap them up when they can. I've seen great pies be snatched up even before they hit the bake sale table. I've also learned the hard way that the people of Ohio are gingersnap haters. Go figure! Go back to Stuff Christians Like to see what you should do if you are in fact the bringer of a pot curse.

One of the ways to take the "luck" out of potlucks is to have each dish designated. One of my friends got a note from the lady's guild at church telling her to bring cherries jubilee to the chicken dinner. Not only did she not know what chicken dinner they were talking about but she had NO clue what cherries jubilee was or how to make it! I'm also not a fan of the alphabetical divide. You know last names starting with A - G brings side dishes, H - R brings main course and the rest bring desserts. Well, I'm a W and like I said some days I'm in the mood to bring a salad. Or spicy Asian lettuce wraps that went over real well. It was a lucky pot luck day for sure.

And in case you're ever in need of something very yummy to take to a pot luck, here's the link http://www.grouprecipes.com/110886/asian-lettuce-wraps.html

Mother's Day

I had a beautiful and classic Mother's Day. Sunday school teachers helped the little boys make hand print crafts, I coerced Little Miss Teen into making a craft for me and I gave my Huggyband a list of ideas of things to shop (the fact that he left the list on the front seat of my van with the stuff he had bought crossed off is besides the point.) We dropped off a #1 Grandma mug at Grandmas (note to self; I think over 7 years of marriage I've given her 5 of these it must be my "go to" gift and I must remember to be more creative next year.) We took a road trip to get me my beloved Tim Horton's donuts and I didn't have to change any diapers. It was a happy Mother's Day indeed. I am blessed with 3 incredible children. Children I honestly didn't think I'd have. Since I'm an only child I thought for sure that I'd inherit my Mom's fertility problems; I didn't. I was afraid that I wouldn't know how to parent more than one child; somehow, I manage. They are the light of my life. They are what keep me going and I'll always be grateful for them.

Mother's Day is one of those fragile days; for some people it's good, for some people it's awful. Sometimes its both. Mixed emotions are common; tread lightly. It's like a flow chart; if YOUR mother is living (preferably close enough to celebrate with) and you have a great relationship or great memories of her then you're good. On this chart you get a free pass to the side that looks at YOU as a mother. But what if your mother isn't alive? What if the track you're going down is that of a loss daughter? I spent time on line yesterday with an old friend who lost her Mom in March. She was a great lady. Wise and talented.... She is missed. I spent time thinking about the family of the patient I lost last week as they met up with their first Mother's Day without her. I also spent time thinking about a few of my current patients families as they faced the reality that this would be their last Mother's Day with their Moms. My heart went out to them.

Obviously I identify with the daughters who have lost Moms. When Hope Edelman writes in her book "Motherless Daughters" that when her Mom died she "wanted to destroy every Hallmark Mother's Day card display" she saw; I say a big Amen. I've been there. Wishing I could just stay in bed and make the whole day go away. Wishing there was some way to teleport myself through certain months. I also remember purposely picking a fight with a young man on Mother's Day because he had in effect ran away from home. Cut his mother out of his life....... That was the first Mother's Day 2 little girls in my life had without their Mom and they didn't have a choice in it. I was angry, I was grieving and I let this young man know it in a very ungracious way.

The second side of the fictional flow chart is if you yourself are a Mom. I have been blessed with fertility and for that I am thankful. But we have friends who haven't. We have friends who are childless by choice and we have friends who feel that God simply hasn't called them to have children. Those friends are in the minority, because we have a lot of friends who want children but can't have them. Today there are 6.1 million woman in America with infertility problems. I can't begin to imagine how awful that must be. My husband can though. It took him and his late wife 12 years to conceive our Little Miss Teen. Yes, she was worth the wait, but it's not a wait he'd wish on anybody.

And then there is road number 3; loss Moms. It doesn't matter how old your child is when he or she passes the fact is that you're still a Mom and that child was still your child. 25% of American woman experience a miscarriage (a person's a person no matter how small) and 1 pregnancy in 80 results in a stillbirth. No; the euphemism "born sleeping" does not help me on that one. We lost baby Jonathan the week before Mother's Day 5 years ago. Talk about months you wish you could fast forward through.... I have a friend who lost a baby that was conceived in violence. She's still a Mom; she would have been a great, great Mom. I honor her. I wonder what Mother's Day feels like for her? I have a friend who's adopted daughter died within a week of her birth; yesterday was painful to her as well. She should have been receiving her first hand print card not grieving. And yesterday was my second Mom's (I have yet to find a way to distinguish my 2 mothers in writing so bear with me; she knows who she is!) without her son. I cried for her. I cried for him. Oh heck I cried for us all. Loss is unfair. Not being able to have kids is unfair. Loss is unfair... Children are fun. Motherhood is hard work.

How a cup of cold water helped me do the right thing and prove others wrong.

"And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward."
(Mat 10:42)

I did this the other day. I reached through a group of people to a grieving woman and offered her a bottle of water. I had the honour and privilege of sitting with her and her family as we waited for her mom to pass. And Mrs. D did pass. Gently, surrounded by her family, pastors, a hospice nurse and me the hospice volunteer. It was the first time I was at hospice working with a family while their loved one died. The loss of my first patient this time around. 14 years ago, 2000 miles and what seems like 5 zillion years ago I lost my first first aid patient on a highway. For a lot of obvious reasons this one was different. It was sad of course, but there was a sense of calmness and peace not anguish and great despair as I was expecting. Heaviness but no fear. I was ok with it. I know that because of my depression there's been a lot of question of if hospice; which everyone seems to think is a sad, sad place, is really the best choice for me? Won't it make me sadder? No, sadness isn't a part of my depression. As the rest of this article will show; doing good does ME good. I get more out of it than I put into it. Helping heals me.

So when I handed Mrs. D's daughter that bottle of water our eyes met and volumes of compassion, sympathy, empathy and grief passed between us. I knew that in that simple act I had made a difference to her; I had shown her Christ and we had both healed just a tiny bit.

I also knew that the pastors across town were wrong about me. Part of the "we're kicking you out of our church" conversation included a few lines about how I would never be allowed to minister in that church again. I've since learned that fear of the depressed person contaminating the flock is a common pastoral response to depression. The problem with that is that it works on the presumption that depression is some sort of chosen sin. And as someone said to me "if depression is sin then so are allergies." No go. Doesn't fly. As they say in the south "that dog don't hunt." As my friends and I were discussing today; sometimes proving people wrong is the best revenge. Or if not revenge then at least proving them wrong feels very, very satisfying.

On the way home from that conversation with the pastors I thought "waaaaaaaaaait a minute, they're saying God can't use me? but God used all sorts of broken people. Heck he even used a prostitute!" Yeah he did use a prostitute; her name was Rahab and her story is told in Joshua 2:1-21. This sermon http://www.mmcc.citymax.com/f/W3Healing_Rahab_ProstituteGodUsed.pdf by Pastor John Rayford of Mount Moriah Christian Church in Bloomington IL says that "your past does not determine your future and that God wants to use your brokenness to let others know that he is not through with you."

Some of this is more than knowing that even in my brokenness God can use me but also wanting to be used. It would be so easy not to. To say "why should I do nice things for people when people have been horrible to me?" The answer is simply: because it's good for you. As my grandmother would say: "when you feel bad do something good for someone else it will help you feel better."

In the 13th Century Francis Asisi wrote:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I would add that it is in healing that we heal. In helping we are helped.

Oh Pastor F, who are you to deny me that healing? If you had truly wanted me to get better then you would have pushed me towards ministry not kept me away from it.
Proverbs 4:23 says "above all else guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." Normally I think of that verse as meaning that you're supposed to guard your heart from the dark stuff that could take root and take over. I've come to understand that it also means not letting your heart shrink. Like the Grinch, whose heart was 2 sizes too small seeing the good of others made his heart grow. Good works, volunteering, loving others as Christ loves them is sort of the armature that I stretch my heart over ensuring that it doesn't shrink. I've quoted the line in the Garth Brooks song before "I do this so the world will know that it will not change me."

Honestly, 8 months ago I didn't care if the world changed me; I didn't care about the size of my heart; I just didn't care what happened. And I've healed enough now that is does matter. For those of you familiar with spiritual warfare you'll see that for all we talk about the big spooky stuff; it comes down to offering a cup of water to a grieving daughter. Doing good when you're at your worst. Shining the light and confounding the darkness (my paraphrase of John1:5)