Prompt Response: Zucchini
What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?
Well, y’all already know about my taste bud changes with stewed tomatoes, but I think this one wasn’t about me changing. It was about being reintroduced to something made the way it should be made.
So when I was in the single digits of age, zucchini made me gag like the little girl on the broccoli commercial. Yuck! And then, when I moved to live with my grandparents the summer after I turned 12, everything changed. My grandma made zucchini, and I’d already told her how I felt about it. But she begged me to try her recipe. And just wow! All kinds of yummy!! 😋
What changed? Zucchini in a can versus zucchini cooked fresh on the stovetop with butter. Now I knew; no more canned zucchini.
Later, though, I had fresh zucchini cooked by someone else. They added tomatoes. There was that yuck again. So maybe it wasn’t the can; maybe tomatoes added to zucchini changed its flavor to something that just did not work for me. But as you can see from the picture, that wasn’t the case either.
I’m with Mark Lowry on thinking vegetables taste better when you fully cook the vitamin taste out of them. Lol 🤣 So I’m not sure if the fresh one with tomato that seemed yucky was undercooked, didn’t have enough butter, or just wasn’t seasoned the way i like. But now, as an adult, I can cook it my way—slow-cooked to tender perfection with butter and garlic and a few low acid (orange or yellow) tomatoes.
I was going to do a blog break until I read the prompt, so this is all there is to the story, but it did make me think about something as I was writing…
We each hear the gospel message of salvation in different ways at various life points. Our age or status, or the source and quality of that message, can make all the difference in whether we accept or reject it. Even as a Christian, I’ve heard messages angrily shouted at someone in ways that made me want to run away. So, I could not imagine the rejection going on in the heart of the one being shouted at.
Like my zucchini taste tests, I encourage you to listen to the gospel from different sources and try it until you like it. I’m not talking about what the Bible calls “itching ears.” because that would mean exchanging the squash for another vegetable. I’m talking about reading it, listening to it, studying it, and mostly digesting it until you can proclaim King David’s words to “taste and see that The Lord is Good!”
Psalm 34:8 BSB
[8] Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
https://bible.com/bible/3034/psa.34.8.BSB
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Prompt Response: Faith is the Answer
How do you handle fear and self-doubt?
I’m not sure where I learned the two acronyms in the image above, but I know they weren’t together when I learned them. The idea of the first part is to see fear as nothing to fear. But, in truth, sometimes it really is something that can harm us or those we love, and being in fear is the normal response we need to activate our “fight or flight” response.
Whether it’s a real, worthy of fighting or evasive maneuvers, fear, or the weight of tossing our troubles around in our minds until they harm us whether they come to fruition or not, FAITH is still an answer. Faith may give you the wisdom you need for a proper fight or the direction to run for a good getaway. Or, faith may just tell you to stand your ground and be still because the battle belongs to The Lord. The hardest and easiest part is when faith tells you that nothing will change but that nothing changing also means God is still on His throne taking care of what we can’t control and of our eternity.
On that last part, I can tell you honestly that the idea of losing anyone I love and care for from this Earth is hard. Thinking of my own passage into eternity is hard. And I need statements like the one above to remind me that God’s got it all in His hands.
Still, it’s totally human to fear and doubt. In Psalm 56:3, King David didn’t say he would not fear but rather …
Psalm 56:3 BSB
[3] When I am afraid, I put my trust in You.
https://bible.com/bible/3034/psa.56.3.BSB
Though, once he acknowledged that he could be afraid, he strengthened himself in The Lord and went on in verse 4 to say …
Psalm 56:4 BSB
[4] In God, whose word I praise — in God I trust. I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?
https://bible.com/bible/3034/psa.56.4.BSB
When the roots of our fears and doubts are of our own making, they can harm us at least as much as real dangers. Recently, I spent an entire night with my lessons, blog, and sleep all negatively affected because I feared an unknown scenario where I’d received a subpoena. Not being a person who likes to defend myself even when I know I’m innocent, that postal note on a certified letter let my mind wander to many possible scenarios. The next day, I thought of better possibilities (like an old family parcel with water rights finally becoming worth something), but oh how the wandering mind can torture us until we know the truth. And at the end, not one thing I imagined matched the real reason for the letter.
So, did I put those weights of the world on a tray and hand them over to The Lord? Unfortunately, not. And He might have been extending His arms, ready to take over, the whole time. As many times as I’ve written about fear and shared miraculous testimonies, wouldn’t you think I’d know better by now? But alas, I am human and have a lot of experience that has set me up for fear and doubt—probably like everyone who reads this post.
I hope that sharing this helps someone to get through a fearful event or time a little more easily, even if it’s because you now know you’re not alone in being a person who loves and trusts God but still gives in to your fears at times. And I hope creating a visual of someone passing the weight of the world to the waiting hands of God will stay with me (and you) for the next time fear becomes a battle.
I wrote the poem below for my sister in 2015 as we both maneuvered life after losing our mom. You can find it to download in its largest size on my Flickr page at https://flic.kr/p/ybqdqj where I’ve listed a regular copyright but am happy to let people use it for personal and non-commercial purposes. Since I’ve placed it on items for sale at Zazzle, I must protect my copyright to make sure no one comes and says I took it from them, but I’m a big believer in freely I have received, so freely I will give.
(Both the image and words are by Crystal A Murray © 2015)
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