My roommate, Jamie, is getting married in May. Jamie is working on her Ph.D. in Christian Ethics; needless to say, she is a woman of principle. She wants her wedding to reflect her values, including simplicity and good stewardship, which are not common words in bridal vocabulary (I know this because we’ve been watching Bridezilla clips to help Jamie remember that she is sane and balanced.)

While it probably won’t be fancy or extravagant, I think Jamie and Daniel’s wedding is going to be beautiful. Their love and commitment won’t be buried underneath tulle and tuxes; it’s going to be the focal point of the wedding. So they've cut out some of the things that are traditionally found in weddings.

Unfortunately, everyone has an opinion about what her wedding has to include. And even though it’s Jamie and Daniel’s day, these other people seem to think their opinion matters. And apparently one of the things that you can’t have a wedding without is cake.

Now neither the bride nor the groom particularly enjoy cake; they decided they would like to eat a dessert they actually like at their wedding. But when two of the seminary secretaries found out Jamie was not going to have cake at her wedding, they were appalled. One of them told Jamie she at least needed to have cupcakes and brought her a cupcake cookbook the next day. The other thought Jamie would start loving cake if she just tasted the right vegan frosting. So she took it upon herself to go home that night, make a batch of frosting and a cake to put it on. And she brought it to work the next morning for Jamie to sample.

Sounds considerate and thoughtful, right? Except she forgot Jamie is highly allergic to cashews. And guess what the primary ingredient in the frosting was?

Cashews.

So my poor roommate had an allergic reaction to the frosting made by a co-worker who wanted to force Jamie's wedding into a cookie cutter...or cake pan.

***

You are masters at making yourselves look good in front of others, but God knows what's behind the appearance. What society sees and calls monumental, God sees through and calls monstrous. – Luke 16:14

I don’t really like eating cake either, but I like baking cakes because they’re so pretty and fun to decorate. There are a few untraditional cakes that I like eating though. My favorite is medovnik, which means “honey cake” in Czech. It’s made of lots of thin honey flavored wafers interspersed with cream filling, which soaks into the layers and makes the whole thing moist and rich and delicious. And there’s no real frosting, which of course is the worst part of cake.

So Dylan is coming to visit next weekend, and he suggested we make some Czech food, possibly including a honey cake. But then I found out Elisa is coming too, and baking for Elisa is like preaching a sermon in front of Dwight Nelson or John Nixon. So I decided I should bake a practice cake before they got here.

I’ve made a honey cake once before in Prague with Emily. It didn’t look that pretty, but it was pretty tasty. Unfortunately, I lost the recipe. So I scoured the internet for recipes and picked the one that was written in the best English. Here is the finished product:

Looks pretty good, eh?

The problem is…it doesn’t taste very good. Not only is it dry, it also doesn’t have much flavor. I even tried drizzling caramel sauce on top, but it still felt like I was eating spoonfuls of flour and sweetened condensed milk. Gross.

***

What you say goes, God,
and stays, as permanent as the heavens.
Your truth never goes out of fashion;
it's as up-to-date as the earth when the sun comes up.
Your Word and truth are dependable as ever;
that's what you ordered—you set the earth going.
If your revelation hadn't delighted me so,
I would have given up when the hard times came.
But I'll never forget the advice you gave me;
you saved my life with those wise words. -Psalm 119:89-93

I tried another recipe tonight. This one was written in Czech, so I thought it might be more legit.

Oh, how I love Google Translate! Check out these gems from the recipe:

If you looked very thin, just let him rest a little longer.

Cream download sites for painting the top of the dough, but do not care!

If-because of the children you give rum flavor, be sure to put more water.

We will fight pancakes with syrup.

We will be with him, then well handled. Thus all bake cakes.

That's how prepared we can eat honey cake in 24 hours, but of course you can have longer to ripen.

The cake doesn’t look as pretty as the last one, but I think it’s going to taste better. And making it was such an adventure!

***

Lessons Learned from Cake:

1. When your opinions cause allergic reactions in others, maybe you should keep them to yourself.

2. Looking good is no good unless you taste good too.

3. Some Instructions are hard to understand, but following them is worth it.

I have a new appreciation for the idiom "it's been a roller-coaster ride."

Well…I didn’t have to wait for long to find out. Right before I went to teach my morning class, I received a very nice email letting me know they had chosen someone else for the position. Someone who is much more qualified than me. I wasn’t that surprised; I’d known all along that the odds of this happening were pretty good. If I were in their position, I would have made the same decision. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t disappointed.

The emotional side of Amanda felt the same way I did when my heart got broken for the first time. Lunch was hard to swallow. The smiling cheerfulness of the people around me felt like lemon juice poured over a paper-cut. I spent the day counting down the minutes until my 7:30 pm class finally got over and I could retreat to my home, fill my tummy with comfort food (good thing I made that pie), and enter the blessed state called sleep, where pain and anxiety are temporarily numbed.

But the logical (and, luckily, dominant) side of Amanda knows that in the same way that two years’ hindsight showed me that getting married to the man who broke my heart would not have been the best plan, perhaps my future will eventually show me that working at Southern was not the best option for this time in my life either. People talk a lot about closed doors and God's will and stuff in times like this. And sometimes I wonder if they're just making themselves feel better. And maybe I am too...but I really do believe that God led in this situation. And is still leading.

So what is the best option for my life now? I don’t know. And that’s terrifying to me, because I panic without a plan. There were many things that made Southern seem like a wonderful plan – a good job description, fabulous friends, co-workers could double as mentors, a pleasant climate, and a community I already belong to and love. It would have been a nice story, but…maybe a bit predictable. Maybe it would have been easy to turn it into a story with limited adventure and limited growth. And I guess I’m not sure exactly what I want, but I think I do want those things.

(But if quality friends, respectable co-workers, nice weather, and a healthy community just happen to be in that story too…I won’t complain.)

A few weeks ago, my roommate and I watched The Sound of Music. That same week I had to walk to school several days because my car battery died and, inspired by Julie Andrew’s positive attitude, I started humming “My Favorite Things.” But as I was trudging through the knee-deep snow, it hit me that snowflakes do not “stay” on my nose and eyelashes. Rather, they melt and run down my cheeks and feel remarkably similar to tears.

While it’s a nice song with plenty of charming images, if I had to come up with new lyrics, I think I would write instead about my favorite people. And someone who would certainly have to be included is Kessia Reyne Bennett.

I used to be really intimidated of Kessia. You know, she’s extremely smart and funny and above average at, well, everything. So when we were both still at Southern, I thought she was way out of my friendship league. Thankfully, she befriended me when I came to Michigan, and this has made my life here much happier.

I guess we often share something in common with the people we make friends with – a similar sense of humor, an interest in a certain hobby, or some common values. But beyond those things, I feel like I have significant differences from most of my friends. My heart and mind seem to work together in different ways from most people’s.

I was surprised and delighted to discover that Kessia, however, is very much the same as me. The quirks that make us different from most people are the characteristics we share. So talking to her is like reading a personality book written especially for me. (Which is great, because I love reading personality books, but the descriptions never seem to fit me quite right.)

My most recent self-discovery via Kessia is that I have a fear of using things up. I always have. When I was a kid, we would pick up candy thrown from floats in the annual Jellico Christmas Parade. The other kids would eat all their candy before the New Year; I made my bag last until at least April. I had a cupboard full of lotions and soaps and bath salts that I would never use because I didn’t want them to be gone someday. I had a whole box of stationary sets that I never wrote on because I didn’t want to run out; instead I would use plain old notebook paper. I felt like someday there would be the perfect occasion for using stationary, and I didn’t want to encounter such a situation and (imagine the horror) find my stationary box empty!

I was telling Andrea Keele about this silly fear (because Andrea also understands Kessia and me) and she said she has a hard time cooking because she is afraid of using up her groceries. I laughed at her a little…until I went to my freezer and saw that my side is overflowing with peaches and blueberries that I picked on Labor Day and carefully preserved for the winter. We do have several months before this silver-white winter melts into spring, but still…it’s been six months since I put that fruit in the freezer, and I haven’t used a single bag yet. I guess I have been waiting for the Perfect Day for Peach Pie.

But when is that going to be? So I decided to make a pie tonight. Not for anyone or anything special. Just for me. Just because I felt like it.

My family isn’t a big movie-watching family; I can probably count on two hands how many movies we’ve watched together. But the finger for one particular movie would have to be really fat, because we've seen it sooo many times. Every Christmas Eve for as long as I can remember, we've watched It’s a Wonderful Life after we finish presents. And every year, we all end up sniffling and wiping our eyes.

You might think we’re silly; after all, if you’ve actually made it all the way through, you know the movie has a happy ending. But George Bailey pays a sacrificial price for his wonderful life, and every year I cry for the dreams he gave up to improve the lives of the people around him.

This year, the movie made me a bit uncomfortable because I related to it more than ever before. Young and craving adventure, I'm inclined to say like George, “I know what I'm gonna do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next year, and the year after that.” But people keep telling me that’s not how life works; you can’t plan it out like that. And that stresses me out a little. I have a lot I want to do, and I feel like I need to be strategic in order to fit it all in. Then again, I wonder if I would want to plan it out like that if I could. It seems that our dreams change along with us, and sometimes what we want turns out to be so different from what we once thought.

I spent New Year’s Day with my grandparents. We were looking for some of my dad’s high school basketball pictures, and in the process looked through album after album of family photos. There was a whole box of “Amanda” pictures. Luckily I was really cute when I was little. Before you think I’m bragging, I’ll be the first to admit that things went downhill quickly when I went to school and I thought braces and glasses were the ultimate fashion statement and my idea of a cool hairstyle involved lots of fluffy bangs.

Speaking of big hair, when we finally got to my dad’s pictures, we found one of his teacher who had a huge beehive. That will forever be the most mysterious hairstyle in my mind; how in the world did they make that happen? Also, my dad had hair. Not enough for a beehive, but there was still some on the top of his head. Weird.

As we kept going back in time, the pictures kept getting less colorful, but much more interesting. My favorite ones were of my grandparents when they were my age. There were a bunch of pictures of my grandpa being silly, and quite a few of my grandparents when they were dating. There was a whole page labeled “going steady for 6 months.” My grandpa played a lot of baseball, and one of my favorites was a picture of him in his uniform with his bat. He’d written on it “To Pat, my favorite fan – Love, Lee.” When I commented on this, my aunt said that Grandpa and written Grandma a whole book of poetry!

These pictures blew my mind. Grandpa does not seem like the type to take goofy pictures, and I can’t even fathom him writing Grandma poetry. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen them exchange a loving gesture or even a complimentary word. Although I haven’t witnessed this myself, I’ve heard tales of Grandma chasing him around the house with a frying pan.

Pictures can be deceiving, but these were definitely taken before the days of photoshop. They seemed like pretty concrete evidence that my grandparents had been in love at one time. And apparently Grandpa had been good enough at baseball that he tried out for the major leagues.

I think it was so hard for me to understand these pictures because now my grandparents seem to have lives that are pretty difficult and not very happy. It had never occurred to me that they once had dreams for the future and strong feelings of love for each other.


When I was 5, I wanted to be a queen.
When I was 9, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher.
When I was 13, I wanted to be a math teacher.
When I was 15, I wanted to be an interior designer (a drastic change!)
When I was 17, I wanted to be a counselor.

Now I am 24.

I want to be a missionary and live abroad.
I want to teach ESL at the university level.
I want to develop an ESL curriculum for churches and train people to use it.
I want to write a book or two.
I want to be a wife and a mom.

But maybe I still I don’t really know what I want - except that I want it to be wonderful.

I don’t like to think of having to give up some of my dreams; of course I’d rather do them all. But maybe I'll grow out of some, and maybe some will have to be sacrificed while pursuing others. I just know that when my grand kids see pictures of me when I was young, I don’t want them to be surprised that I had dreams once.

So we made the above video to show in Missions chapel today (if you can't see it, click here). It wasn't my idea (since I wasn't deep in the Amazon jungle and to my knowledge, I didn't eat any bugs while I was an SM), but I do what my boss tells me to.

This morning I decided to cook some rice to take with my lentils for lunch. I was in a hurry, so I just poured the rice and water into the rice cooker without washing it first. As I was about to put the lid on, I noticed quite a few brown flecks floating in the water. Hm, I guess there's a good reason for washing rice after all, I thought.

But upon closer inspection, I noticed the brown flecks were moving. On their own volition. My rice was riddled with bugs, and this was no dream.

The bugs had gotten into the entire bag of rice, so I dumped it in the trash, likely canceling out all the rice I've ever donated to starving children through freerice.com. Luckily the bugs had not discovered my bag of brown rice, so I didn't starve for lunch.

Funny story, right? So supper rolls around, and I eat some random leftovers. I decided to finish my meal with cinnamon graham crackers and homemade applesauce. Yummy...

Yucky! There were bugs crawling all over my crackers!

Unfortunately, I didn't even notice until I'd already eaten several crackers. Apparently I can't be a hypocrite even if I want to.