Five on Friday--June 7
Thank you all so much for such a kind response to my post from last Friday! I have gotten the sweetest, most encouraging texts, messages and comments, and I can’t tell you how much those mean! I’ve heard that some of you are now interested in learning more about the enneagram, some of you are trying fish tacos for the first time and several of you have messaged me about screen time plans for kids and asked what book you should read first this summer! (by the way, that’s my very favorite question so if you ever need help picking a book feel free to let me know!) So without further ado here are your five things for this week…
ONE
This past weekend was the funeral for Rachel Held Evans, and if you were able to watch the live stream you know it was a stunningly beautiful and meaningful service—one that reflected her life and ministry so well. I think I’m still struggling a bit to put into words why her writing and her work meant so much to me, and how she’s shaped so much of my understanding of theology over the last ten years. But what I do know for sure is I have grieved a lot this month since she died May 4th. I think I cried every day the first week after her death, and I mentioned to friends that I felt so silly grieving so much for someone I didn’t know personally. I met her in the book signing line at last year’s Evolving Faith conference and she served me communion at the end of that weekend, but otherwise I didn’t know her personally. But I kind of did. Rachel wrote so vulnerably, sharing so much of her brilliant mind and tender heart with all her readers that it has truly felt like I’ve lost a friend this month. My best friend sent me a beautiful necklace last week with the words “eshet chayil” engraved on it which means “woman of valor” and comes from Proverbs 31 where we often find the verse translated “a wife of noble character…”. But really it’s a phrase Rachel explained that the Jewish community uses to celebrate women, to call out the courage, strength, conviction, and valor we see in one another. I used that phrase as the basis for one of the women’s luncheon' talks I gave at our church in California, calling on our ladies to begin naming the valor they saw in one another, not competing with one another but urging one another forward, celebrating the everyday acts of courage we as women undertake on a daily basis. Walking into a chemo treatment, caring for an ailing parent, showing up with a casserole to a grieving friend’s house, caring for our neighbor’s children while her husband is in the hospital, setting boundaries to protect our loved ones from toxic relationships. Everyday acts of courage and valor Rachel wanted us to name in one another, using the phrase to celebrate what we DO instead of using it as a phrase to point out the ways we’ll never live up to the “perfect Christian woman” some would say Proverbs 31 is. I have so many more things I’d like to share about how Rachel’s ministry has challenged me and helped me grow and, well, evolve in my faith, as her conference was called. And I’ll share more of those things this summer as I keep reflecting, but for today I wanted to share the benediction her dear friend Nadia Bolz-Webber gave at her service. It embodied everything Rachel stood for and believed in and was the perfect sending for those gathered to grieve.
Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are they who doubt. Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. Blessed are the preschoolers who cut in line at communion. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
Blessed are those whom no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers. The closeted. The teens who have to figure out ways to hide the new cuts on their arms. Blessed are the meek. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like. Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried. Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else. Blessed are those who “still aren’t over it yet.” Blessed are those who mourn.You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
I imagine Jesus standing here blessing us because that is our Lord’s nature. This Jesus cried at his friend’s tomb, turned the other cheek, and forgave those who hung him on a cross. He was God’s Beatitude— God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong. So to close with words from Rachel herself, Jesus invites us into a story bigger than ourselves and our imaginations, yet we all get to tell that story with the scandalous particularity of this moment and this place. We are storytelling creatures because we are fashioned in the image of a storytelling God. May we never neglect that gift. May we never lose our love for telling the story. Amen.
TWO
It seems silly to go from grief to a recipe for your summer table but I warned you these 5 things were going to be random and have no connection! In case you need another summer favorite recipe, you absolutely cannot go wrong with this one. Our entire family loves this. My parents loved it when I made it for them. I posted it on Facebook well over a year ago and got more comments on that post than I do on most—so many folks tried it & loved it. It LOOKS like a lot of ingredients, but I promise this is a simple recipe that is a full meal in and of itself—no side dishes needed (I am kind of terrible at serving meals with good sides, I’m great at the main dish and then I’m like “umm here are some grapes!” So this meal gets me off the side-dish hook). I will actually double the teriyaki sauce when I make it and cut up double the chicken and then freeze half the chicken in half the sauce so I have another batch pretty ready to go for another day. You can grill these on skewers as kebobs (like I do) or grill the veggies in a grill basket.
Grilled Hawaiian Chicken Teriyaki Bowls
4-5 boneless, skinless chicken tenders, (or about 2 chicken breasts)
1 zucchini, sliced into rounds for skewering
4 mini sweet bell peppers, any color, chopped (or I will just chop up one full size bell pepper)
1/2 a pineapple, peeled and cut into spears (or chunks if you’re making kabobs)
1 small red onion, sliced thin
2 cups water
1 1/2 cups canned unsweetened coconut milk, (about one 13.5 oz can)
2 tsp packed light brown sugar
1 tsp salt
2 cups jasmine rice, or white
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 Tbsp sesame oil
1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp honey
3/4 tsp ground ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp cornstarch+ 2 tsp water, mixed together
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
Make the coconut rice by adding the water, coconut milk, sugar, and salt to a large saucepan. Bring to a boil, then stir in rice. Return to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand 10 minutes, before fluffing with a fork.
Meanwhile, make the teriyaki sauce by adding all of the sauce ingredients to a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, and boil for about 1 minute. The sauce should be thick enough to coat the back of the spoon.
Pour 1/4 cup of the teriyaki sauce over the raw chicken and set aside to marinate for at least 15 minutes (or longer if using chicken breasts).
I make these into kebobs—skewering the chicken breasts with the veggies and pineapple chunks and cooking them on a grill, turning every few minutes until the chicken is done. Serve in a bowl with a scoop of rice on the bottom, chicken and veggies on top and leftover sauce drizzled over the top. And be amazed and what an amazing meal you’ve made :).
THREE
A couple years ago at Christmas there was a big, heavy box wrapped under my parent’s tree with my name on it. I couldn’t wait to open it, wondering what it possibly could be. My folks are usually really great gift givers, so I just KNEW it was going to be an amazing gift and I waited patiently until it was time to open presents. They set the box in front of me with a grand “ta-da!” and I pulled back the wrapping paper. Inside was a brown shipping box taped shut. I cut the tape, opened the flaps, and found a box absolutely full of….wait for it….all my childhood “treasures” with a note on top saying they were done storing it and at the age of 34 it was time to take to my own house whatever it was that I wanted to save. The “gift” was that they paid for the box to be shipped to Florida.
Ahh all the childhood papers and school stuff and art projects and class pictures and character certificates….it all piles up, doesn’t it? I know it’s not just my kids that come home with backpacks full of stuff and if I’m not careful I find myself buried in glitter glue snowmen or coloring pages of The Hulk that they did during that one rainy day recess. Especially now, at the end of the school year, piles of things arrive on my kitchen counter as desks and cubbies are cleaned out. Or maybe you’ve been making a pile somewhere all year of projects that have been coming in the door , and you are now finished with school and faced with the task of what in the world to do with all this stuff. It may sound funny, but receiving that Christmas “gift” a few years ago just as my kids were starting school helped me really think through the conundrum of what to save and how to store it. You see, when my sister and I went through our boxes of my childhood stuff at the age of 34, we found that about 80% of the stuff in that box we honestly didn’t care about.
Emily Ley is the creator of the lifestyle brand Simplified. She makes the day planner I’ve used for a couple years and has written a couple books and does a lot on social media around the idea of simplified living. Her motto when it comes to kid’s stuff (or honestly any stuff in the house really!) is that they keep what is Best, Favorite or Necessary. If it doesn’t fit into one of those 3 categories neatly, it doesn’t get saved. I’ve adopted this motto wholeheartedly over the past couple years and now that we’re 5 years into school (between preschool and elementary school) we have a great system in place for dealing with kid paper stuff. You may have an awesome system in place but if you don’t, I’m going to share what has worked for our family—what we keep, what we don’t, how we decide, and how we store the things we are hanging on to. If you don’t have kids, honestly, this applies to so many areas of life—clothing, your own paperwork, home decor—you name it, this can apply!
When things come home from school I look over the paper or project and decide a couple things. Is this something I want to display—is it a worksheet where we traced letters to practice our handwriting? I admire it and we recycle it. If it’s an art project, or a test with an awesome grade, I have one spot in my house (the pantry door) where I display kids work—I use washi tape to put projects on the door. When the door is full and new things come home, I’ll pull down something older and ask myself “is this really the best thing, the favorite thing or a necessary thing to keep?” If it has a hand print or footprint on it I automatically say “yes, it’s a mommy-favorite, it’s a keeper.” If it’s a test with a good grade, well we’ve probably admired it enough, and it can be recycled because we don’t need every spelling test, we’ll get the report card at the end of the quarter showing us our overall grades. If it’s a coloring book page, well again there are going to be hundreds of these throughout our childhood, I physically can’t store them all! We’ve admired it and we can recycle it and put up something new. Honestly my kids have never asked where their stuff is, they have moved onto the next thing and don’t care anymore. And I tell them, “I am so proud of your work, but we have a limited amount of space and we can’t keep it all.” They want to be celebrated in the moment and are fine with things being recycled as long as it’s not a “best, favorite or necessary” item. If a certificate or character award or report card comes home that goes in a file folder I keep in the kitchen all year labeled “for memory boxes.”
At the end of the year (so this was my project this past week) I go through my memory boxes folder and we file things away. Each kiddo has ONE plastic storage tub that fits under their bed. This is where special art projects we want to keep go that are bigger than the 8x11 slots in a file box. Honestly I try and keep only about 5-7 things from the year because we have a LOT of years of school to go and a limited amount of storage space! Each kid also has a file folder box like the one pictured above which are their “memory boxes”. This is where I file things like the final report card from the year, certificates, their class picture, a copy of that year’s school picture, any birthday cards from that year I want to save for them etc. Anything that will easily fit in a hanging 8x11 file folder. And that’s it. Most things that come home end up recycled and we keep only those essential “best, favorite or necessary” items from the year.
I have friends that are huge savers and that’s totally fine! However, just something to consider if that IS you, think about what you would do if your parents arrived at your house tomorrow with boxes and boxes of your art projects and school work from your years of school and said “we’re done storing this, it’s yours now!” As my sister and I sorted through our Christmas “gifts,” what we realized is we honestly could care less about most of it. It went into the recycling bin 30 years later after being stored and moved from house to house by my parents for 3 decades. What we really wanted to keep were about 1-2 things from each year that showed who we were that particular year. The hand print crafts where we could see our little palms. The very first “book” I wrote as a 7 year old (about the Pilgrims in case you were wondering, I don’t know why publishers weren’t knocking down my door, it was a gem!). The birthday cards from my 4 grandparents who are no longer with us but whose handwriting is so precious to me. The newspaper clipping from the day the Sacramento Kings won a spot in the NBA conference finals (if you didn’t know me way back when you probably don’t know our family were DIE HARD Kings fans and went to a ton of games each year. I may have even had Sacramento Kings wallpaper on my bedroom wall in middle school….) Those are the things I wanted that defined my childhood. The best things. We didn’t care about our random hand writing assignments, coloring pages or multiplication tests. So as I think about the things I think my boys are going to want to see again some day, I try and remember they aren’t going to want to see it all. They will want to pull out and show their kids the absolute best or favorite things from their 1st grade year. It’s okay to give yourself permission to recycle some things, help them narrow things down to their very favorite couple of art projects from the year and explain that you are saving room for what’s to come next year. Someday their 34 year old spouses will thank you for not arriving with boxes and boxes of memorabilia they have to find a place for!
FOUR
I don’t know how things work in your houses, but in our house we have never had more than 1 television, so whatever we’re going to watch in the evening we have to both agree on. Sure there are many nights I choose to read and Charles will watch some WWII documentary or some post-apocalyptic show I could care less about, but for the most part whatever we’ve watched in the course of our ten year marriage we’ve both watched together. And sometimes it’s tough finding something we’re both interested in! When we saw that Netflix released a series with David Letterman awhile ago, we decided to give it a try. Many of you have probably seen it, but if you haven’t it’s a show called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction and it’s simply a conversation between David Letterman and whomever his guest is in front of a live audience. They do a great editing job filling in some of the person’s backstory, visiting their hometown or childhood friends, showing where they came from and what has made them who they are today. His guests have been incredibly diverse—season 1 was Barack Obama, Malala, Jay-Z, George Clooney, Tina Fey and Howard Stern. There were a couple of those that one of us was hesitant to turn on, wondering if it would be decent and here’s what has shocked us. We’ve both enjoyed every single interview. We’ve learned something from each of these individuals, come to understand more about what has led them to where they are in life now, and found ourselves developing empathy for some of their stories in ways we probably wouldn’t otherwise have. Season two just dropped this weekend with interviewees Ellen Degeneres, (which we watched last night and thought was an excellent conversation), Kanye West, Melinda Gates, Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, and actress Tiffany Haddish. I have a lot more to write another time about the conviction I have that as Christians we need to be listening to voices and hearing stories from people whose lives are so vastly different from our own, but for now I’ll just say this show has been a wonderful way to do so and I’ve learned something from each person’s story. Have you watched? Did you have a favorite episode? Let me know!
FIVE
And finally for your weekend, a perfect summertime family mystery that I blazed through because I had to find out what happened. The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth is a fantastic read, especially if you are a fan of Liane Moriarty books. In the opening chapter Lucy and her husband Ollie find out that Ollie’s mother Diana has died and it looks like it’s a suicide. But as the police investigate the scene things are looking more and more suspicious. There’s a bottle of drugs in her hand but zero evidence of those drugs in her body. The will had been changed at the very last minute. There was a note but it was left in a strange spot. And there are 4 family members who all would have had very different reasons for being angry at Diana. This one jumped back and forth between the past, unfolding the family story over the years and the present as the police investigation is on-going. There’s nothing gory, creepy or anything that kept me up at night (which is why I don’t usually read mysteries!). Definitely a fun summer beach read!
Enjoy your week friends, and we’ll see you back here next Friday!
