Five on Friday
Hi friends! It’s another weekend again! A 4 day week always throws me off, but I hope you enjoyed your short week and that your weekend is full of time with family, maybe some football, and a great snack or two—happy Friday! And now for this week’s 5 things…
**ONE**
At the end of July, the world lost one of the most incredible women I’ve ever known. That’s not hyperbole or some type of statement made with grief-colored lenses, that’s a statement I’ve made many many times over the years about my friend Susan. She battled breast cancer courageously for seven years before she went home to meet Jesus face to face, and while I know she’s smack in the middle of the biggest party of her life (because Susan never met some event she couldn’t turn into a party) the world isn’t the same without her. (This is her meeting baby Aidan 11 years ago).
I met Susan Artime right after Chuck and I had gotten married in 2009. He needed to do a ministry internship for a school year, part time at a local church, and he landed in the youth ministry at Glendale Presbyterian Church where several of our friends from seminary also attended and served as interns or on staff. I was finishing up my own internship at another church so it was a few months before I began attending with him or volunteering with him, and during these few months Chuck kept talking about the Artimes and what an incredible family they were, and how he couldn’t wait for me to meet this woman named Susan because he knew I’d love her.
My first introduction to Susan Artime (and the Artime home and family in fact) was in June of 2009 when I got roped into helping with a weekend mission trip for the youth. The students were all going to sleep at the Artime home (girls in the basement, boys in their converted garage out back that served as a teen hangout space) and we’d serve locally in Pasadena. I had never done a dang thing with teenagers before, they honestly terrified me. I’d never chaperoned anything, I’d never met any of these kids, didn’t know who the Artimes were, and was quite honestly terrified going into that weekend. But Chuck’s best friend was the youth director and he needed another female leader. Being the people pleaser that I am I said yes. I walked into their home that evening and was met by a blonde woman with the biggest smile on her face who enveloped me in a hug and said “you must be Chuck’s new wife! We are SO happy to meet you, I’m Susan! Come on in, I’m making cookies!”
I wish I could communicate what it was like to walk into her home. My first impression was honestly that there was stuff everywhere. I love clean spaces, clear counters, and piles of stuff make me twitchy. Susan’s home felt like chaos to me. There were things everywhere, there were people everywhere, coming and going in and out of the house to the backyard pool and back house. The kitchen had teenage girls hanging over the barstools chattering away while Susan pulled frozen pizza after frozen pizza out of the oven and popped trays of cookie dough into it. I had no idea that this woman thrived with people, things, ideas and plans swirling around her but it was remarkable (and slightly overwhelming!) to watch. I could not imagine how this one woman was going to feed everyone for a weekend and I was so overwhelmed by all the teens I didn’t know and the chaos around me I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick around to find out.
Of course I did. I didn’t run for my nice quiet apartment even though that’s what I wanted to do. I stayed. And that weekend, that introduction to a woman named Susan Artime, who was an absolute force of nature, changed my life. For the next three years I would spend an exorbitant amount of time in her home, standing in that kitchen, swimming in her pool, hanging out in her back house with teenagers, celebrating her daughter’s sweet 16 at the best birthday party I’d ever been to, and sitting in her basement every Monday night for youth ministry team meetings (her husband Henry was the elder in charge of youth ministry at Glendale Pres and is an equally amazing human being). As I did so I got to know a woman who had been so transformed by the love of Jesus and so set on fire to introduce teenagers to Him that she made it her mission to share the love of Christ by feeding every teenager in town. She had 3 kids, who were in probably 4th grade, 7th grade and 9th grade when I met them—and her older two, her daughters, showed me how incredible it can be to build a relationship with teenagers—they were the biggest gift.
Susan believed that you could always get a kid to open up if they were either being fed or serving side by side with her in the kitchen. She had this uncanny ability to see which teenager was on the fringes of a youth group pool party and she’d pull them into her kitchen under the guise of needing their “help” but really she gave them a break from the crowd and a listening ear. She used to drive her car to the high school during lunch and for underclassmen who couldn’t go off campus for lunch she’d have a trunk full of pizza and she’d just feed her girls and ALL their friends pizza out of the back of her car. She had multiple freezers that were always absolutely full of things she could throw in the oven at a moment’s notice when kids showed up at her house (which was an almost daily occurrence, her daughters had an amazing circle of friends who would sometimes just show up even when the girls weren’t home just to hang out with Susan). I helped her make more frozen pizza snacks and chicken nuggets than I ever imagined possible. The youth group practically lived at her house in the summer, I don’t even want to know what she and Henry spent on pizza and soda over the years feeding teens.
She taught me that loving kids involved inviting chaos into your home and life. But that it was always worth it. I rarely saw her without her apron, she’d fill her apron pockets with popsicles and wander around the youth group pool parties handing out grace and love in the form of frozen Otter Pops and hugs. And every single teen at Crescenta Valley High School knew who she was and had probably been fed by her at least once in their lives.
Her biggest undertaking every year was the annual youth group Houseboat trip. For over 20 years Glendale Pres had taken groups of high school students to Lake Don Pedro, a few hours outside of Los Angeles, for a 5 day house boating trip, and for over 20 years Susan was the one who fed these kids 3 meals a day in the galley kitchen of a houseboat. Did I mention there were 100 people on this trip every year? Chuck and I had the privilege of going three years in a row and my first year I was recruited to be on her kitchen crew for the week. There were 6 of us young adults plus Susan who stayed on the main staff houseboat and I got a front row seat to the most impressive operation I’ve ever seen. For 5 days we prepped, served, and cleaned up 3 meals a day for over a hundred people in one houseboat kitchen and watching her was one of the things in my life I’ll never forget. She was in her element, she knew exactly how to pull this off, she had an incredible system in place to keep all the food cold throughout the week, and she was NEVER frazzled to the point of being grumpy or snippy with anyone. She wanted this week every year to be the absolute best week of these kid’s lives and she was going to do whatever was in her power to turn that trip into the biggest party she could in hopes that throughout the week they’d get a chance to meet Jesus and come to love Him the way she did. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. At her funeral they asked anyone who had been fed by Susan on a houseboat to come forward. They estimate that over the years she fed 3000 people from her houseboat kitchen. And those kids never ever forgot the way she made them feel loved on each of those trips.
We left Glendale Pres after we graduated and moved about 40 minutes away to work in another church, so I didn’t have the opportunity to see her nearly as often after that, but I had her come and speak to our Mothers of Preschoolers group one year to try and encourage moms to invite friends and community into their homes, even if their home felt chaotic and messy with little kids around. She reminded us that sometimes that’s where Jesus does His best work—not in the neat tidy spaces, but rather in those messy moments that inspire vulnerability. And she reminded us moms to never, ever underestimate the healing power of some homemade chocolate chip cookies to cure all kinds of pain.
I’ll miss her. This world isn’t the same without her, but I will be forever grateful for the way she invited anyone she crossed paths with into her beautiful, joy-filled, messy, chaotic and Jesus-filled life. If she were here today she’d tell us it is worth it. Inviting people in and feeding them in the name of Jesus is always, always worth it. Rest in peace dear Susan, your fingerprints are all over lives on this earth and we can’t wait to celebrate with you in heaven one day, maybe even on a houseboat or two.
**TWO**
It is the MOST wonderful time of the year! I wish I was creative enough to rewrite the whole song because no, I’m not talking about Christmas (although we have hit September, so the stores would like to remind you that Christmas is coming…). I’m actually talking about the start of football season. Now, if you aren’t a football fan, don’t just skip this paragraph, I promise there’s a deeper reason I adore football season that perhaps you might relate to even if watching grown men tackle one another isn’t your thing.
I haven’t always been a football fan. Growing up, most of you know I was an absolute fanatic for the Sacramento Kings. I was ALL about the NBA and followed it obsessively. Growing up in Sacramento, that was the only team we had and our family shared season tickets with another family so we went to a lot of the games which was one of our very favorite family activities. I went to a small Christian college that didn’t have a football team, so I never got into college football. All I really knew about the sport is that it was a long game that usually involved my dad napping through part of the 49ers every Sunday. I didn’t understand the rules (what the heck is a down?? Why are there so many different types of points you can score?) and didn’t live close enough to a team to care.
When I moved to Jacksonville in 2016 people started telling me I’d become a football fan, that I had to pick a college team and I’d become a Jags fan even though they were pretty terrible. I thought they were kidding. What I didn’t realize is that football is the THING in the south. Everyone has a team, and in the fall I quickly learned you can’t plan a social event for a Saturday afternoon if you want people to come because they will be watching their team play instead. Now I’ll be honest. I follow college football, I know where the teams stand, but I really am not invested. I didn’t go to any of these schools, I don’t know the players, and while I’ll say I’m a Clemson fan and watch some of the games with Chuck, Saturday football isn’t my obsession. Sunday however? That’s a different story. And it started a year after we moved here, in the fall of 2017, because of my desire to simply sit on the couch and get a break.
I noticed that my husband had no issues with planting himself on the couch every Saturday, no matter what time the game was, even if our kids were around to give attention to, for a solid 3.5-4 hours each week. That first year here this drove me absolutely nuts. I mean it would never occur to me to sit down in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and watch Gone with the Wind while the kids clamored for snacks and attention, but apparently it was acceptable for every guy I knew to do essentially the equivalent week after week throughout the fall. I just did not get it but resented the carefree way he seemed to be able to just take a break each week (yes, I am now aware that it was my own pathology that made me unable to do so, not my husband ever telling me I shouldn’t take a break too!)
Sunday would roll around and I found that he didn’t care all that much about the Jags or the NFL, so he wasn’t nearly as likely to sit for the whole afternoon to watch them play. Which felt like my great opportunity. I started coming home from church and turning on the 1:00 Jags game each week and planting myself on the couch. When the kids would want something I’d simply say “go ask Daddy, mommy’s watching her game.” Did I know any of the players? Nope. Did I care all that much? Nope. Did I read during the commercial breaks? Absolutely. But week after week I started happily taking care of the kids Saturday afternoons while Clemson played and then happily telling them to go find their dad on Sunday. Sometimes he’d be watching with me and then I’d remind him that he got to watch an entire football game the day before and it was my turn to watch now, so he’d do nap time or play games with them while the TV was in the background.
Week after week went by that fall of 2017 and the strangest thing happened. I started learning players names. I started understanding the rules. I watched as we lost game after game that fall (we were truly terrible from September to November) and then I started watching as we began winning. You could feel the excitement in town, the Jags had won a stretch of games! Then there was talk of maybe squeaking into the playoffs and before we knew it they actually found themselves in the playoffs not doing terribly. Week after week I sat and watched every Sunday afternoon and realized it was no longer my ploy to just sit and do nothing, it was truly something I found myself enjoying. That year ended and the next few seasons I watched every Sunday as we landed dead last in the NFL not once but two years in a row.
Things have turned around here in Jacksonville. We have a team full of talent this year, we made a solid playoff run last year and went undefeated in the preseason this year. The buzz is palpable as we wait for our first game this weekend. Now watching the Jags week in and week out is something that we all enjoy; even Aidan the other day said “I can’t wait for football to start and then we’ll have an excuse to just sit together on Sundays and relax.” I was surprised that’s what he said, but he’s absolutely right. That’s the secret thing about being a football fan I didn’t know, it gives you an opportunity to truly take a break each week, sitting and rooting for a team for 3-4 hours on an afternoon. It’s a built in sabbath if you will, chores can wait, there’s no pressure to go do any big social events or family adventures because we all want to be watching the game and all our friends are in their homes doing the same. There is this collective pause button we all press and for those few hours it’s okay to simply stop. As someone who has an absolutely terrible time doing nothing, sitting in the middle of the day to watch anything on TV feels like something that shouldn’t be allowed. I know that’s ridiculous and it’s my own issues causing this, but for someone who thrives on accomplishing tasks, football season has turned into one of the biggest gifts I never knew I needed. The family camaraderie, the snacks, the forced break in the middle of a weekend, I love it all. Oh, and if we happen to take a run for that Super Bowl game this year? Well I know a few folks in Jacksonville who might loose their minds with excitement.
**THREE**
Last week I mentioned the book Tranquility by Tuesday which has really inspired me to think through a few new things. I shared a week ago about how helpful it’s been to implement Friday planning instead of Sunday or Monday planning. Another idea I took from Laura Vanderkam in this book is the idea that doing something 3 times a week makes it a habit. Friends, I don’t know if anyone else needs to hear that, but the absolute freedom that one tiny thought has given me has been revolutionary this past month for me. We have a very all or nothing culture. Either we are super committed to something and therefore we should do it daily, or it isn’t important enough to do daily so why bother trying? For years exercise has been this way in my life. I hate it. I understand it’s important, but I truly hate it. Yes, I have a lot of baggage from high school PE, with teachers and their clipboards constantly frowning at my mile time or disappointed in my inability to hit the dang baseball. Exercise wasn’t fun, which meant I wasn’t motivated to do any.
Of course I realize the importance of it, and have been working lately to make some changes, and to move my body so much more than I ever did. I joined a gym, and my goal is to get there 3 days a week. What Laura Vanderkam helped me realize in her book was that we don’t actually have to do something every single day for it to become a habit, or for it to make a difference in our lives. Sometimes three days a week is enough. She tells her readers to decide what new habit they are trying to build and then decide how many days a week they’d ideally like to do this thing. In their weekly calendar she has them plan out time for this thing and plan one extra time slot than they really need for their goal. So if my goal is to get to my gym 3 days a week, it means I designate 4 time slots in my weekly schedule for the gym. Her idea is that something is going to happen to derail one of those trips to the gym. Someone’s going to get sick and need me at home, the car is going to get a flat tire, a repair man is only able to come fix something during one of my gym times etc. Life happens. But when it does, I can still make my 3 day a week goal because I PLANNED for life to happen. If by some sorcery the universe all aligns and I don’t have anything derail my 3 days at the gym then I either can choose to go that 4th time OR I can take that time and do something else for myself during it. This has made such a huge difference for me, planning that back up time slot and recognizing that doing something 3 days a week really is enough. I feel better, and I also love the mental freedom that comes with saying “exercise is important, but I don’t have to force myself to do this 7 days a week if that feels like too much.” I don’t know what habits you might be trying to form—maybe it’s reading more, cooking dinner more (hey if a family is hitting up the drive through 6 nights a week, then just saying I’m going to make 3 dinners this week is a HUGE change and a great new habit!) or like me, trying to move more, but maybe if we start with the freedom of 3 days a week we will find ourselves baby-stepping our way to some progress and success.
**FOUR**
One of my frustrations when I go to meal plan is that, probably like most of you, I have recipes kind of stored everywhere. I have cookbooks I adore and love cooking out of. I have recipes saved on line. I have recipes printed out in a binder of family favorites. I have some in the notes app on my phone and some in my email. They’re everywhere, and because of this I never make half the ones I mean to because I forget about them or the recipe is buried in a binder of other things! So I make the same 15 things over and over until I hate cooking because I’m sick of them. I went searching for a solution and asked in a Facebook group I’m a part of if anyone had found a good solution for this problem. The number one recommended suggestion was to download and use the Paprika app. It’s a recipe manager and yes there’s a cost to the app but I’ve been using it and playing with it for a week now and I absolutely love it. It is 100% the solution to my problem. You can import any recipe from the web easily, with the click of a button, and once it’s imported you can tag it with multiple tags to help you locate it and categorize it. So for instance I tagged my crock pot chili with “ground turkey,” “Slow Cooker,” “Freezer Friendly” and “Soup”. Then I started going through my cookbooks and any recipe I either already like or want to keep/make someday I am importing to Paprika. Most recipes you can find on line. I have multiple Pioneer Woman cookbooks. All you have to do is google Pioneer Woman and the name of the recipe and 9 times out of 10 it’s come up either on Ree’s own site or someone else has blogged about that particular recipe and shared it. Again, click a button, it imports it for you, you tag it how you want to and keep going.
For the few I haven’t been able to find online I am just typing out the ingredients in the ingredients section for a new recipe, tagging it how I want to, and instead of typing out all the cooking instructions I’m just putting the name of the cookbook and page number so I know where to find it when I want to make it. But this way the recipe will come up when I search for something to make with chicken breasts. You can also search by a specific ingredient—so for instance I have a ball of fresh mozzarella in my fridge right now that I don’t want to go to waste so I went into Paprika and searched for ingredients that included “fresh mozzarella” and up popped the 5 recipes I have that will help me use up that ingredient. Guys I am in love. Yes, it’s been a project importing and migrating all my recipes to one place, but I think once I’m finished it will be so incredibly worth it. It’s definitely gotten me out of a cooking rut I was in because I can see all the yummy ideas in front of me that I remembered I liked cooking in another season of life but had just forgotten about. So I don’t know if anyone else is up for a big project, but if meal planning feels like a horrific chore for you, perhaps part of the frustration is from having to look in too many places to narrow down what you want to make. If that rings a bell, then perhaps Paprika might be a fun thing to add to your life as well!
**FIVE**
Speaking of recipes, I don’t know if anyone needs a delicious cookie recipe, but I can attest that Joanna Gaines’ Silos Cookies from her second volume of her Magnolia Table cookbook are fantastic. They DO include peanut butter chips but you could absolutely sub extra chocolate chips instead if you have peanut allergies in the home and just create a chocolate chip/oatmeal combination cookie (or as the author of this blog post says she’s tried butterscotch chips which could be good too). I was in a baking mood for some reason this week, and wanted to try a new recipe instead of my old standby of the Nestle chocolate chip cookies I always make. I decided on trying these on Wednesday and they made a TON. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with all these cookies in the house and then I realized youth group small groups started that night—Aidan is in the 6th grade boys group and Chuck is in the room next door helping lead the 7th grade boys. I have about 20 middle school boys every week I can bake for, which is the greatest realization ever! I enjoy the process of baking, but I don’t want all the sweets in the house all week. So I sent a batch to each life group (and labeled the containers with a peanut warning) and while the containers weren’t empty they did a number on them! I’d love to try and bake for these boys fairly regularly, (after all, Susan’s number one philosophy of youth ministry is always feed them!) so if anyone has any fantastic cookie recipes for me to try please send them my way!
Phew! This week’s post was long! If you’re still reading, well thank you! I hope you have a lovely weekend filled with all the best things in life and if you need me on Sunday, well you know where all of us will be from 1-4 this week! Go Jags and happy football season ya’ll!
