Pickles

This is my first jar of pickles for this year. Yeah! I actually have cucumbers and dill ready in my garden at the same time. Lacto-fermenting is great for pickling just one jar at a time. When I can pickles I have to wait until I have 3 lbs of cucumbers ready at the same time. Plus I have to be available to can. And have all the other necessary ingredients ready, including jars and new lids.

Someone told me that my pickles were the only crispy homemade pickles they had ever tasted. I attribute my success to these tips.

1. Pick cucumbers in the morning and use right away
2. Use a fresh head of dill in the jar

What works for you?

Recipes

Forest of Dill

Forest of Dill
I love to grow dill. I make my own pickles- lacto-fermented. Also good for Dilly Dip and Garlic Dill Potatoes.
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Summer Reading - Captivating - Chapter 5

Welcome back to our summer book reading of Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul by John & Stasi Eldredge. This week we are discussing chapter 5 titled
A Special Hatred. Feel free to read and comment, even if you don’t have the book.

In this chapter Stasi tells her own painful story. She was wounded by her father and turned to alcohol, drugs, and men to fill the empty space. This path brought only more wounding, reinforcing the messages from her childhood.

“Hide your heart. You are a disappointment. You are worthless. No one cares. No one wants to care. You are alone.”

Do any of these messages ring true in your heart and mind?

Beauty is dangerous
So many women have been assaulted, beaten, raped, controlled. Young woman being sold into sex slavery. Baby girls being left to die.

Where does such hatred come from?

“Eph 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Lucifer was created beautiful. In his own beauty, pride entered in. Now the Evil One hates beauty and tries to destroy it – especially Eve and her daughters.

“You won’t understand your life as a woman until you understand this:

You are passionately loved by the God of the universe.
You are passionately hated by His Enemy.

…for there is One greater than your Enemy. One who has sought you out from the beginning of time. He has come to heal your broken heart and restore your feminine soul.”

My thoughts
My youthful beauty was dangerous because I was so naive. And I was assaulted. I cried through this chapter. It never occurred to me the spiritual battle of the Devil trying to destroy femininity. His lies and deceit like Wormtongue.

God has been in the process of healing my heart all these years. It has been one layer after another, reaffirming His perfect love for me.


Your Turn
Where has your emptiness and longing led you?
What has God rescued you from?

Summer Reading - Captivating - Chapter 4

Wounded

These words are razors to my wounded heart. – William Shakespeare

Since we live in a fallen world, every person has some sort of wounding. There are no perfect parents. Some have been hurt more than others. When a person responds out of a place of wounding, it hurts others. It can be a devastating blow from generation to generation. A destructive cycle of wounding.

Wounded hearts can allow shame to enter. Shame that causes us to look away or to hide. A feeling that if someone really knew us, we would be abandoned.

Hurt causes people to make vows that wall us off from love and trust in order to protect ourselves from further wounding. This is an unholy alliance with pain that keeps us from perfect love. Perfect love is from God.

1Jn 4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
1Jn 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.

What vows have you made to protect yourself?
Are you repeating a destructive pattern of thinking?

God is greater than any pain, wound, or hurt. God is longing to love you more perfectly. Let Him in.

Summer Reading - Captivating - Chapter 3

Haunted By A Question

Eve – What Happened?
All that beauty, romance, and adventure sounds interesting but most of us are piled under loads of laundry. Real life is more like routine, chores, and screaming kids. Diets, busyness, self-improvement, activities. We hide or give up.

Our husbands are hiding in their cave wondering. Do I have what it takes?

The question girls ask is – Am I lovely? Girls want to be loved, delighted in. Sadly, many have given up.

Dominating women
Some women choose to dominate their world and control it, refusing to be vulnerable.

Desolate women
Some women are far too vulnerable, desolate and needy.

Whatever path you have chosen to fill the empty space, the ache, the loneness, only God can satisfy. Nothing on earth can take the place of relationship with our Heavenly Father. No amount of money, food, new clothes, friends, a new guy, whatever the world has to offer will never resolve the deeper issues of our souls.

Find your rest in God.

Summer Reading – Captivating – Chapter 2b

Beauty

God’s creation is beautiful. Look at the flowers and trees, mountains and valleys, sunrises and sunsets.

The apostle John describes the beauty he sees around the throne in Revelation.

Rev 4:3 And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
Rev 4:6 And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal…….

The beauty of God’s creation speaks. When my father passed away, we happened to be visiting at the ocean. In my sadness, I sat and took in the beauty and vastness of God’s ocean. It spoke to me that God was so much bigger than me or my grief. I was comforted.

A Mystery

Every woman has a beauty to unveil because you were created in the image of God. This kind of beauty you cannot find in a salon or in plastic surgery because it is the essence of who you are. Unique only to you, remaining a mystery until sought out.

Pro 25:2 It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

The Gory of God

“Beauty says, There is glory calling to you. And if there is glory, then there is a source of glory. What great goodness could possibly have created this?...Beauty draws us to God.”

Not the world’s plastic beauty. But the experience of who you are. What makes you laugh or smile, your thoughts, your heart, the way you move, your ideals, the sparkle in your eyes…

When I look in the mirror I see wrinkles, bulges, and an old hairstyle. When my children look at me they see the mother who loves them. When my husband looks at me he sees years of intimacy and togetherness, trials and triumphs. When my friends look at me they see a shared secret or memory.

“There is something uniquely magnificent and powerful about a woman. We tried to reveal the immeasurable dignity, the holiness of your feminine heart by showing that it is God who longs for Romance; it is God who longs to be our ezer; it is God who reveals beauty essential to life. You are the image bearer of this God. That is why you long for these things too.”