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Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I bumped into this wonderful, heartwarming, and funny, Thanksgiving post on the Catholic Digest and wanted to share it with all of you! (Reposted in its entirety with permission from the Catholic Digest.) I hope you enjoy and I send all my best for a fun and delicious day!
We Have One Job - By Simcha Fisher Once upon a time, there was a young woman who was hosting Thanksgiving dinner for the first time. She wanted—no, needed—everything to be perfect. She planned and prepped for days, chopping vegetables, rolling dough, scrubbing baseboards, and counting silverware. On the day of the feast, she was up with the sun, full of determination and manic good cheer. As the day wore on, the good cheer waned and the manic levels rose. Pots boiled over and were turned down; ovens smoked and windows were opened. The clock ticked, and little by little, the meal started to come together. The guests would be there in a matter of hours. Could she pull off the perfect day? She really thought she could. Then, suddenly: calamity. She ran out of butter! Real butter, creamy and fat, the fuel that makes the Thanksgiving engine run. She had to have some. She shrieked for her husband and sent him out to the store, with instructions to come back as quickly as he could with at least two pounds of butter. Off he went. And he didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back. She grew more and more frantic and considered her options. She could cook without butter. No, impossible. She could just explain things to the guests. Unthinkable. She could burn the house down and move to Guadalajara. Now we’re getting somewhere. Just as she began to search for her passport, her husband’s car screeched into the driveway. He was home, home with the butter! Hallelujah, the day was saved! With trembling fingers, she snatched open the bag . . . and then fell back, the words of thanks dying in her throat. She croaked. She gabbled. She gaped. There on the table was a three-pound tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! “Boy, the stores were crowded!” her husband said. ”I guess everyone was shopping for Thanksgiving. But I knew you would like this, because you just wanted two pounds of butter, and this is three!” What the young woman replied, I cannot record here. But she did point out to her husband, possibly dozens of times, that, “It says right on the package that IT’S NOT BUTTER.” Well, Thanksgiving happened anyway. The food was hot and bountiful, the guests were jovial, and if anyone noticed that the butter was not butter, no one mentioned it. It was a good Thanksgiving. You may think I’m going to wrap this story up with a moral about how we ought to be thankful for the best efforts of our loved ones, and that what really matters in the end is family, peace, joy, harmony, and good intentions. But, no. What I’m thinking is, “Seriously, it said, ‘IT’S NOT BUTTER’ right on the package. Right on there! And he brought it home anyway!” Know who that reminds me of? Me. Not on Thanksgiving, but every week, every day. Every time I go to Mass, the last thing I hear is, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” God is telling us, “Look, you have one job. One job. Go and serve me.” And I say, “Amen, Boss!” and off I go. And then what do I do? I come back with a giant tub of “I Can’t Believe I’m Not Serving God!” And I jog back into his temple, all hopeful and proud with my ridiculous little package clutched under my arm, and I say, “See? Look what I found for you! Good, huh? Just what you asked for, right?” It’s not what he asked for. It’s a substitute. It says right on the package that it’s not what he wants. And God opens the package, and he says… “Close enough. Come on in, thou good enough, faithful enough servant. Come on in to the feast I have prepared for you. Sit down with your family in the home of your Father, and let us have a meal together.” And that, my friends, is why we celebrate Thanksgiving. Not because we have it all together, not because things turned out perfectly, not because we never disappoint each other, or because we always please God. We celebrate Thanksgiving because God loves us even when we fail--especially when we fail. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love is everlasting. Simcha Fisher is a blogger for the National Catholic Register and Patheos.com. She has just released her first e-book (with print version to follow), The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and nine children.
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[Loud groan] “You can’t put frozen packaging in the recycling bin.”
The concept of recycling, while super beneficial to society, appears to be entirely too complex to apply. How else to explain the number of times I have, (patiently, I believe, though he might argue), had to explain the nuances of what gets recycled to my otherwise amazingly brilliant husband. Admittedly, it can get confusing. Some plastic is okay while some is not. Cardboard might look fine, but any waxy stuff on it and there is nooooo way it can go in the bin. I understand that it is enough to make a grown person call it quits and simply throw anything and everything into recycling (seriously… tin foil???) In the olden days, when life was simple, we just had reuse, repurpose, or refuge. Canning jars got reused. Old t-shirts were repurposed as cleaning cloths. Horse manure made great compost. And broken wooden toys got throw in the fireplace. With progress, though, came the ability to create stuff so durable that it could outlast everything but a two year old. What to do with that two foot synthetic stuffed animal that no longer had eyes or an arm? Throw it away, of course. Except…. Imagine a dump filled with odd assortments of items a two year old has destroyed. It would not be a pretty site. In fact, it would probably be the stuff horror stories are based on. Magnified by our use of synthetic material on everything and that dump has gotten out of control. I’d like to think I try to make a difference. But in fact, I am as much a part of the problem as anyone. The water bottles alone that I dump each year could probably fill my backyard. And though for a while I tried to use a reusable water bottle, the hassle factor eventually wore me down so that I continue to use and toss as I had been doing. But while I continue to strive to be better at using less and recycling more, the real problem I am fighting is figuring out which stuff can go in which bin. Organizing, in general, is sort of an obsession with me. So, you can see where this issue would both peak my interest as well as overwhelm me. It would be like giving me something that looks and acts like Tupperware, but then telling me I can’t store it with my other containers. The complexity of organizing would be unmanageable. So I understand where my husband struggles, really I do. If I could, I would live my life in my favorite store, New Seasons. There they have simplified the process of throwing things away. Pictures to tell me what goes where, canisters for each thing, limited choice of containers to only those that go into one of the bins they make available and pictures they show: this is how I would like to live my life. I suppose the moral of the story is that more choice isn’t necessarily always a good thing. It would be fine if all of that waste didn’t add up to an earth overcome with garbage; but it does. So although I refuse to put pictures of all of our different types of garbage on my refuse and recycling bins, I do think it is time to simplify the challenge. If it is too difficult to decide where to throw the empty ice cream container, well then I suppose I will have to stop buying ice cream for the family. And then, we’ll see how long it takes my otherwise perfect hubby to catch on to the fact that frozen containers don’t go in recycling. Where are you on the spectrum of recycling? Do you have a good way to remember what goes where? I love, love, love to hear your comments, so please leave me some. No, really! And to prove how much I love hearing from you (and I know you are out there, because I get statistics on how many people visit this fun blog:>) I will donate $10 to the charity of choice for one lucky commenter in the month of November. Simply leave a comment and then check back at the end of the moth to see if you won. |
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