The Heat in Marriage
June 12. 2018
Recently I was looking through my Grammy’s old cookbook. Its copyright is 1941, brand new from her mother, the year she moved to K-State to be a Home Ec major. Although this thing is beat-up with handwritings, food stains and page tears which tell a story in itself, it has about everything I’d ever need. (And some I won’t...like jellied lamb salad and pickled pigs feet!?) There is however a page Iuse often: Generic Starter. It’s a basic recipe for cookie dough, bread, sauces. It has all the necessities to the individual beginning base but has two more needed steps later:
1. Add the good stuff: berries, cheese, chocolate, whatever unique flavor we decide.
2. It still requires baking.
Now folks, it’s June. In Phoenix. At 110. We have restricted electricity hours and I generally try to avoid heating up anything in my home. For all our sakes. I can do with a good no-bake cookie recipe for a while, but really, is it fair to cancel warm apple cinnamon breakfast bread all summer just to avoid the heat it creates? Hardly. So I got out my Turkey Roaster. It cooks, has a temperature dial, and I can put it on my back porch, thus avoiding the heat inside my house.
And friends, it worked! I had found a better solution to the needed heat my basic recipe needed!
And this pretty much sums up our married life as we celebrate 19 years today.
Generally speaking, we were two people who had the ingredients to a good starter: two parents who loved each other and Jesus. They taught us each how to care for money, people and time with generosity and fun as well as intellectual responsibility. A good start.
But marriage, it’s got these two added steps. For one: the added extra.
And Dave is that for me. It’s like adding blueberries to bread, the extra cheese to an already good enchilada. Shoot, he even makes the grossest things in life bearable— like when brussell sprouts are wrapped in bacon—-even then, he tells me we can handle it. He is the perfect flavor I needed to add to my recipe.
But the other part? The heat? It’s the step I typically want to avoid. However, in nearly every recipe, it’s there. It’s actually needed. The temperature change creates this chemical reaction that does not happen if the ingredients were left on their own. We all have heat in a marriage and like my turkey roaster, I look for ways to make it better, but it’s simply not a step I can skip altogether.
If I’m honest though, I hate that heat. But it’s used in my marriage. If handled right, it creates an opportunity for real change in me, by God, that can’t be done if we’re left on our own. Dave and I are being created into something new when we deal with that inevitable heat with intention. No matter what delicious extra we personally add to our generic bread recipe, without the refining heat, adjusted at the right temperature, it simply won’t be. God does something through that time, that I simply can’t do on my own.
So today, year 19, I celebrate Dave, the added delicious extra he brings to my life and the heat that is unavoidable when he married me and my “extra dash of salt”. For it is creating something unique to us, that hopefully has a legacy of committed love, re-fillable patience, and a history of a few spills and stains that withstand the test of time to tell a story just like my old cookbook.
Recently I was looking through my Grammy’s old cookbook. Its copyright is 1941, brand new from her mother, the year she moved to K-State to be a Home Ec major. Although this thing is beat-up with handwritings, food stains and page tears which tell a story in itself, it has about everything I’d ever need. (And some I won’t...like jellied lamb salad and pickled pigs feet!?) There is however a page Iuse often: Generic Starter. It’s a basic recipe for cookie dough, bread, sauces. It has all the necessities to the individual beginning base but has two more needed steps later:
1. Add the good stuff: berries, cheese, chocolate, whatever unique flavor we decide.
2. It still requires baking.
Now folks, it’s June. In Phoenix. At 110. We have restricted electricity hours and I generally try to avoid heating up anything in my home. For all our sakes. I can do with a good no-bake cookie recipe for a while, but really, is it fair to cancel warm apple cinnamon breakfast bread all summer just to avoid the heat it creates? Hardly. So I got out my Turkey Roaster. It cooks, has a temperature dial, and I can put it on my back porch, thus avoiding the heat inside my house.
And friends, it worked! I had found a better solution to the needed heat my basic recipe needed!
And this pretty much sums up our married life as we celebrate 19 years today.
Generally speaking, we were two people who had the ingredients to a good starter: two parents who loved each other and Jesus. They taught us each how to care for money, people and time with generosity and fun as well as intellectual responsibility. A good start.
But marriage, it’s got these two added steps. For one: the added extra.
And Dave is that for me. It’s like adding blueberries to bread, the extra cheese to an already good enchilada. Shoot, he even makes the grossest things in life bearable— like when brussell sprouts are wrapped in bacon—-even then, he tells me we can handle it. He is the perfect flavor I needed to add to my recipe.
But the other part? The heat? It’s the step I typically want to avoid. However, in nearly every recipe, it’s there. It’s actually needed. The temperature change creates this chemical reaction that does not happen if the ingredients were left on their own. We all have heat in a marriage and like my turkey roaster, I look for ways to make it better, but it’s simply not a step I can skip altogether.
If I’m honest though, I hate that heat. But it’s used in my marriage. If handled right, it creates an opportunity for real change in me, by God, that can’t be done if we’re left on our own. Dave and I are being created into something new when we deal with that inevitable heat with intention. No matter what delicious extra we personally add to our generic bread recipe, without the refining heat, adjusted at the right temperature, it simply won’t be. God does something through that time, that I simply can’t do on my own.
So today, year 19, I celebrate Dave, the added delicious extra he brings to my life and the heat that is unavoidable when he married me and my “extra dash of salt”. For it is creating something unique to us, that hopefully has a legacy of committed love, re-fillable patience, and a history of a few spills and stains that withstand the test of time to tell a story just like my old cookbook.
Comments
Post a Comment