Food, Glorious Food

I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, because of more awful information I just found out about food. Food is EVERYWHERE it seems, yet more and more of the time, I find I cannot bring myself to eat it, buy it, feed it to myself or my family.

We pride ourselves on constantly trying to eat better and healthier, but we have found it so hard to do with a limited budget. We only buy our grocery meat from stores where we know the animals are fed vegetarian, non-hormonal diets. I recently realized that even though we get our meat from those places, only places that are "certified humane" are the ones that guarantee humane treatment of the animals. Dang it.

I try to buy organic fruits and vegetables if they fall under the Dirty Dozen list that reveals the ones with the most pesticides detected. I buy truly natural, plain yogurt and occasionally Fage with some fruit. I am learning to make breads at home. But I still do a lot of shopping at Aldi: nuts, chocolate, spices, milk, butter, pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, avocados, mushrooms, cheeses, frozen berries, and frozen veggie mixes. Shopping there saves us TONS of money, but after today, I just don't know what to do. I've known for a while that I want to eventually switch us over to more local dairy, but I also found out that the majority of cheeses are made with a GMO--rennet from cloned cows. I need to research this a little more, but let me say...our family LOVES cheese. It is also a great way to easily flavor up the meatless meals I try to make us more and more.

One of the handful of times I've fed my children something with food coloring in it.

I guess I just feel defeated. I know I can do so much more, but it is already so tiring, and so guilt-ridden. I keep trying to cut back on our grocery budget but keep finding it virtually impossible. The more I find out about the food I buy at the regular grocery store, the less I buy, and the more I spend. I hate that this is what it's come to. Plus, I feel doubly guilty because I know that we as Americans spend the least percentage of our income on food. We have so much more disposable income because of it--but it has come at a huge cost. I don't think it takes much thinking to see what that cost is (in the form of disease and death).

Sometimes, yeah...I hate having convictions.

Here I am, somewhere on the New England coast, when I was 2 or 3, I think. I have always loved this photograph, even when I was little. It seemed to encompass how I felt for most of my life, and to say, "Yes, I love cloudy and rainy and misty and stormy days." I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking about that when this was taken, but, you know, it's fun to superimpose interesting, melancholy thoughts on a person you see in a photograph. Even a child. I also love how this reminds me of my own beautiful daughters: the curly, brown hair and the chubby cheeks, the diaper butt and the sweatpants. My dad took some beautiful photos.

Philanthropy, Aid, Etc.

I just purchased my first pair of pretty TOM's shoes yesterday. After I ordered them, I sarcastically said to my husband how "proud" I was, and how good I felt, for having bought them and thus "given" a pair of shoes to a person in need.

*Gasp!* How could I make fun of such a worthy cause, one might ask? Well, it certainly is complicated, but...my views of aid have changed drastically in the last two years or so. I have read a few books, listened to a few radio programs, and read several articles that have slowly begun changing my mind about what is and what isn't "good" aid. When it comes to TOM's shoes, essentially, the reason I'm not going to pat myself on the back for the BOGO is because shoes aren't the true need for most people living in poverty. If we really wanted to help change things for those who don't even have shoes to grace their feet, we need to give them the means to buy shoes, or even make them. The issue is much more complex than that, but here is a start-off point if anyone is interested in reading further.


I definitely have more reading to do on the subject, and I plan on it. As someone who is drawn very deeply to the African continent and its people, I question my own and others' intentions and effectiveness when it comes to helping. It seems as though all of our helping has not truly made a significant impact on the lives of those who, unfortunately, remain in dire need. I cannot, of course, place blame or point fingers, but I think, as the article (see link) discusses, we need to examine the ways in which we go about aiding poverty-stricken nations and our own intentions and desires. I tear up every time I read something or watch something that is a detailed view of life for most people in Africa. Why? I don't exactly know. I know part of it is that I am ashamed of myself, honestly. Ashamed of my discontent with all that I have, ashamed of my luxurious way of life and how I feel as though working with people in need might somehow make up for all the years of blissful ignorance I've spent complaining and wanting more.

Yet, it's not all of that, I know. I definitely have a deep desire to help. But I and my husband hesitate to just jump across the ocean and start doing something in Africa because we want to know what it is God would want us to do there, and to do that--not something we think will be helpful or good. And finding out what that is, exactly, if anything, is not an easy task. In the meantime, we need to step it up and live out our calling here, in Tennessee, because whoever is given much, from him much will be expected--and if he is faithful with what he is given, he will be given more to manage and steward.

31..and My Dad is Gone

I have not blogged for several months. I think I can be forgiven, or at least forgive myself, for this. My father went to the hospital in late November for "ulcer pain," which was found to be pancreatic cancer. A short two-month fight later, he passed away on February 6. He was only 58 years old. I am basically shell-shocked. I have so many different feelings inside of me about it, but probably the main things I want to express on my blog are 1) how much his remorse and repentance and my forgiveness of him affected our relationship and 2) how much I relied on Jesus to get me through those two months. I almost feel kind of bad saying that, because, um, HELLO. I was not the one suffering pancreatic cancer. He basically couldn't eat a meal for that entire time. But let me just say how much it eased my fears, my worries--how it gave me hope in the face of his dire circumstances, the ability to be honest with my father about his own relationship with God, about how I felt about him and our relationship, and how Jesus helped me just relate to a dying man. I read several times about Jesus' reaction to Lazarus's and John the Baptist's deaths. I went through a ton of photos yesterday, thinking about how He worked so many things out--the biggest one, being led by Him to move to Tennessee, which was an hour's drive away from where my dad had moved 8 months prior, and how my dad ended up in our city's hospital that entire time. I was literally just a 20-minute drive away from him that entire time, and his last week of life, just a 5-minute drive, since they had transferred him to a hospice just down the road. O_o I mean, for real. And mainly, how God mended our relationship and enabled us to have a real FRIENDSHIP as I grew up. I haven't had time to fully process or grieve, but I think this will take a long, long time. I miss you, Daddy.