Home from church

The service today at St. Peter's was full of zingers. First the congregational prayer zapped me:

I have struggled to walk faithfully with You and I have not made friends with the foolish, nor do I socialize with the deceitful.... You ask us to love one another and show each other honor. You tell us to be zealous, faithful and serving You in all things. But You know me, O God. You have heard my spiteful words, my judgment of others but not myself. You know how selfish and stingy I have been with money, time and talents. 

Ouch.

And then the second lesson was from Romans 12.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor... Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.... Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.

More ouch.

And then the sermon, which you can hear for yourself if you want to here.

And finally the hymns. Like Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross and Rock of Ages.

I felt like the whole thing was meant to grab me by the scruff of the neck and give me a little shake, because I am not accomplishing these things. I'm so glad I went to church. I'm not glad every week. Sometimes I feel dragged down, not by the service but by my conflicts with a very few of my fellow church members. Today's sermon turned me back toward looking at what I am doing wrong, rather than what they might be doing wrong. I needed that.

In other news, over at Christ Community Evangelical Free Church, our friend Rinda (name altered slightly to protect the guilty) drove the church car on a ladies' outing. And bumped it. Just a tiny bit. Anyway, this week, she opened her bulletin and followed along with the printed hymn lyrics in the bulletin - and then came to this neatly printed addition:

Our pastor drives a beat-up car
Just an old tin-canner.
Worse today than yesterday
Thanks to Rinda Danner.

In closing, I'd like to ask you to pray for my cyberfriend Felisol. Last I heard (which was last night our time), she was waiting at her mother's bedside, as her mother completes her days in this life and moves into the next. She has faith that her mother is saved and will move right into the arms of the Savior, but goodbyes are still hard, and she needs strength for the vigil. May God bless Felisol and her whole family.

Dehydrator

My dry-mesh open-air dehydrator is really working out well. It takes longer to dehydrate in it than it would in an electric one, at least in our climate (in the desert, it probably would not be much longer, if any), but it uses free solar and wind energy. So far we have dehydrated morel mushrooms, fresh parsley (I got it on clearance at the market), rhubarb, a lot of peaches, and now I have spinach leaves in it. I read an interesting piece on line about dehydrating spinach. You wash it, take the stems off, and dry the leaves until they are thoroughly crunchy-dry, then run them through the blender to make spinach flour, which you can then easily incorporate into soups and sauces or (and this is my favorite idea) into pasta dough to make spinach pastas.

Yesterday morning I picked through our row of spinach, taking every leaf big enough to pick, and it was decimated. All that went into the dehydrator. Lil Miss A commented that she wished she could have had one more spinach meal before I did that. I figured it was done for the year, because I was pretty brutal with my picking. But by evening time, the row had grown a whole bunch more spinach and it's ready to pick again. Amazing. And now Lil Miss A can have more fresh spinach for lunch.

The peach slices, by the way, are so delicious. The peaches when fresh were a little disappointing, picked early for shipment and so not very sweet when they finally did ripen. But when we (the girls and I) sliced them thin, dipped them in vinegar water anti-browning solution, then dehydrated them in the open air, all the sugar they contained was concentrated, and they are irresistible. I ate way more than I should straight out of the dehydrator.

Getting ready for church this morning... Today our family is providing the meal for fellowship hour after services. This year I made (surprise!) peach pies, 5 of them, to serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I panicked when I got the pies ready, thinking there might not be enough for everybody. You just never know what attendance will be like in the summertime. So I quickly made a big pan of strawberry rhubarb crisp to keep as a backup. If we don't need it, we can bring it home.

Lil Miss A leaves this afternoon for her week at Village Creek Bible Camp. She is very excited.

UPDATE: We didn't even touch one of the pies. :) We will be eating pie and crisp for a week.

Caww to Wuhhhship

I have the call to worship portion of the service this morning and I'm practicing while I sip coffee.

Just tell me that this doesn't scream out to be said in the voice of The Impressive Clergyman from The Princess Bride:

"Love rings our bells this morning; grace welcomes us as we draw near."

Which would be, "Wuvvvv... Twuu wuvv is what wings ouw bewws this morning."

I must stop or I'll be laughing. In church.

Strawberry Shortcake for a Crowd

Adapted from a recipe on allrecipes.com.

Strawberry Shortcake for a Crowd
(makes about 80 servings)

Ingredients:
18 c. all-purpose flour
1-1/2 c. white sugar
1/2 c. baking powder
3 lb. salted butter
1 quart heavy cream
6 eggs, beaten
8 pounds strawberries
3 c. sugar
4 cans of aerosol whipped cream topping

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2  In a VERY large bowl, combine flour, 1-1/2 c. sugar and baking powder. Use a pastry blender to blend in the butter. Make a well in the center and add the beaten eggs and the heavy cream, and stir to blend.
3.  Turn dough out onto a floured board and knead about 2 minutes. Then divide the dough into 4 parts. (If you prefer, divide the dough into 4 parts before the kneading to make the kneading easier.)
4.  Pat the dough about 1/2 inch thick into 4 ungreased 15 x 10 inch jelly roll pans. Score the dough in 20 servings per pan.
5.  Bake the shortcake about 20-25 minutes, till lightly browned.
6.  Wash, hull and slice the strawberries. Toss them with the 3 c. sugar to allow the juice to release.

To serve, cut the shortcakes apart, then split them through the middle. Layer the bottom of the shortbread, then a spoonful of berries with juice, then the top of the shortbread and finally top with whipped cream. Serves about 80.

Busy but productive weekend

Saturday morning the Kee High speech team bus left Lansing at 6:45, so I drove K and his teammate in and afterward got a nice early start on the day while the rest of the family slumbered on. I cleaned and cooked and cleaned, then we all drove down to Starmont High School and watched a few acting pieces including K's. It was hilarious, and he did a great job. We didn't know it till later but he scored all 1s (the highest).

We grocery shopped in Prairie du Chien on the way home, then started seriously cooking for Sunday, and late in the evening we welcomed a missionary from Uganda, Emily Dwyer, and her grandson. They stayed the night, then came to church with us, where Emily did a presentation on her mission. After church, we had a light lunch at our house for anybody who wanted to get to know Emily more, and had  a nice group of about 20 people. There's still food left, by the way. Emily and her grandson headed home around 2, and Britta headed back to her dorm a little later. Then I tackled my messy office and, in a fit of insanity, actually cleaned and rearranged it and now it's very inspiringly spacious. Almost makes me want to go back to work tomorrow.

Hey, how did it get to be 10:32 already? - Daylight savings time stinks.

A hotdish that tastes a lot more exotic than it really is

Yesterday, January 17th, marked 125 years exactly from the day that a bunch of German immigrant farmers formed our church, which is now St. Peter's Christian Community Church. And of course we celebrated with a potluck. That's what we do. Our church definitely has the spiritual gift of potlucks.

In a crock pot was the most delicious-looking pasta dish. It looked like it might be sausage and pesto sauce. I had a serving of it, then went back and had more, and then so did everybody else because it was DELICIOUS! It's only fair for the church ladies to put their names on their crock pots in freezer tape so you can identify the maker. I mean, it's just good form, right? This crock pot was brand new and had no freezer tape on it. We were all asking each other whose it was, because we all wanted the recipe for this wonderful dish.

Finally Karen Leppert, one of our organists, casually walked over and picked up her now empty crock pot, and we all pounced. She was surprised that we loved her hotdish so! But she agreed to share the recipe.

Here it is as she gave it to me. It doesn't look like much, but trust me, it is. Use the spinach. She used penne for the pasta. I think when I make this at home I am going to try it with ground turkey and ground turkey sausage rather than beef for lightness.

By the way, I'm trying out a new recipes widget from keyingredient.com. What do you think?

Blaze Orange Daughter

Britta is home for Thanksgiving, and Barry's sister Ronda, her husband Bill and their little girl are also here from Texas. Bill has been trying to bring in his first deer. This afternoon he took Britta out with him, and she asked me to take a picture of her in blaze orange.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving service over at the church tonight. I always wish I could stay home and then I'm always so glad I didn't, once I'm there. It was wonderful. I just love my church.

Benjamin's Song, Funny Bulletins and Nativity Sets

Today at church Barry and I sat at opposite ends of the pew, as usual, like bookends, keeping the children sitting up straight with their pages all facing in the right direction, so to speak. (Last week we sat side by side for the first time in I don't know how long. I loved it. Today we were back to normal.) We sang "It Is Well With My Soul," which I always think of as Benjamin's song. Benjamin was my nephew, my brother's eldest child. We received a phone call one awful day in his mother's pregnancy with him, telling us that Benjamin had died in utero. An hour or so after that we had to go to our church small group study and we sang "It Is Well With My Soul." Ever since then, it's been Benjamin's song to me. After a couple of years, I got to the point where I could sing it without breaking down, but then this morning for some reason it all just came rushing back again and I went all teary over it and couldn't sing. And I was a wreck for the rest of the service. Every song made me cry, all the prayers made me cry, singing the Doxology made me cry... Oh brother. Funny how that can happen.

The one thing that did not make me cry was this hilarious picture on the cover of the bulletin. It's from Augsburg Fortress Press, and the note says it is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (16th century). Look at some of those faces in the crowd! Methinks Bruegel was a frustrated caricature artist. Look at the group down here in the left bottom corner. "Be nice to Bruegel, and if he ever offers to put you in one of his paintings, say thank you, but no."

And then we came home for lunch, and finally put up the Nativity set and got out Christmas decorations. We were really slackers this year. We usually put them up the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Part of it is that after living in no-kitchen chaos for months, I don't want anything extra, don't want to see messes, don't want to have to hunt for anything that's been put in a slightly different place from usual, and so I am less than thrilled with the idea of getting out decorations, which amount in my mind to "just more stuff." But I stifled the humbug that is me and we hauled the boxes up from the storeroom.

First was the Annual Assembly and Arrangement of the Nativity Scene, supervised by Maria, starring a cast of porcelain figures, grunt work done by Lil Miss A and Master K...


... followed closely by the Annual Feline Inspection of the Nativity Scene and Comfy Nap By the Stable, starring Briggs Stahl.

Lil Miss A's Gingerbread House

Lil Miss A and I drove to Waukon so she could participate in this morning's annual gingerbread house decorating activity for schoolchildren in the area, sponsored by Kitchen Krafts. Here she is, back home, just before she started eating her gingerbread house.

While she was decorating her house, I got groceries, filled up the car ($1.559 a gallon!) and bought chicken feed and window washer fluid at the feed store.

Driving was a bit scary but we were fine, especially with 100 pounds of chicken feed in the trunk on the way home to keep us on the road!

Once back in New Albin, we stopped by the annual Karen Lee and Daughters Holiday Craft Sale. I bought a handcrafted graduation card for Miss B (Lil Miss A picked it out), a plate of cookies (also selected by Lil Miss A, naturally) and a video transfer DVD produced by Errin Wilker of some old movie film of New Albin in the 1930s, coupled with some video of Shooky Fink Days during the 1990s. I have not looked at it yet.


Finally, back home, I opened the mail and found this neat postcard of St. Peter's when it was known as the German Evangelical church. (Some of the old timers in town still just call St. Peter's "the German church." This is the same site as the brick building built in the 1950s. I wonder why the lot was fenced? The postcard is not in the greatest shape, as it was torn out of an album (there is black paper residue on the back), but what a nice shot of our church! I bought this on eBay. The seller stated he could see part of what he thought was a 1907 postmark. I am not seeing it. But it's old. It's a RPPC. Great to add to the collection.

In a bad attitude. (Yes, again.)

Church Council meeting tonight. I am not prepared. Plus my work at home is not done. And I am trying to transition to full time, 40 hours a week. I'm not making it.

I don't want to be the treasurer anymore, that's what it comes down to. I am going to tell them tonight that they need to start looking for someone to take over. I have done nearly 5 years of this and the books are in much better shape than they were when I started. It's not an easy job, and it takes a lot of time. I will need all the time I can find to be making lines when Barry's job ends.

*sigh*

P.S. My stomach hurts.

Sunday Funnies

Barry preached at our church this morning, as Pastor was out of town. He had a rather complex subject - the parables of the vineyard and the unfaithful tenants - plus he's been working very hard, not sleeping a whole lot, and finally today dawned dreary and rainy, a perfect day for staying home and drinking cocoa in one's jammies rather than going to church. As a result, his demeanor was very low key. I kept trying to send him mental energy beams across the sanctuary, but it didn't work.

Afterward, there were the usual "good sermon, Barry" comments from our longsuffering congregation, but then Dottie K. said very sincerely, "Barry, that was a great funeral." We both broke up, assuming she was joking, but it turned to be a slip of the tongue, a rather freudian slip at that.

Master K's Confirmation

I was hoping to have pictures to post with this but so far they are all still in Barry's camera... somewhere. So I'll just add them later if I can.

Yesterday, three young men and one young lady were confirmed at St. Peter's: JF, AS and my son, and the young lady, Miss J. Confirmation is not a part of Barry's and my raising, so it's new to us, but yesterday was beautiful. All four of these people stood and gave personal testimony, had hands laid on them by Pastor, we prayed for all of them and then the four of them took Holy Communion together for the first time.

It was moving and inspiring. This is our church's future!

St. Peter's Cemetery clean-up day

The winter was a hard one -- hard on people, hard on trees, hard on animals. Our cemetery was really showing it, too. We had... let me see... at least 4 winter interments this year and the ground was all torn up from the grave-digging equipment. Also the poor hungry deer had eaten the bottom 4 feet or so of the arbor vitae trees that stand sentinel around the cemetery, and the trees were looking very shabby.

A few brave souls ventured forth this morning in driving wind, off-and-on rain and temps in the mid 40s to clean it up. Their efforts were rewarded, as eventually things cleared off and dried up until it was just good working weather - dry, not too hot.

They groomed the fresh graves, filled in divots from the heavy equipment, and they trimmed ALL the trees, removing the bottom dead limbs. The trees actually look better than they did pre-deer-dinner! You can see the grave markers much better now.

Workers were Wendell and Marilyn Wild, Gene Maurer, Barry Fruechte, Wayne Meyer and Barry and I and our son.

Three hours later...

I headed over to the church to do the end-of-year reports that I had been putting off (they are to be presented to the council tomorrow evening). I prayed before I got started - prayed for accuracy and efficiency. Three hours later, I am home. The reports are done. I have not yet done the 1099s for the staff but that can wait a bit.

This was a wonderful year. I ended up writing a letter to the congregation to go into the annual report they will all get telling them how blessed the church is and how much blessing others we were able to do because of it. (I hope this doesn't count as bragging:) The brothers and sisters there gave nearly $50,000 this year - absolutely a record - for a total annual income of around $64,000. And they gave away about $10,000 of it.

I'm getting teary all over again just thinking about it.

What a blessing this "job" is!

Christmas Tree

This afternoon the children and Barry went to a tree farm to pick up a tree for the church narthex. They wanted a big one. They found it.

As they drove through LaCrosse on their way home, people were staring, taking pictures on their phones, waving, shouting "Hi Clark!" and such.

Fellowship Hour

The first Sunday of every month, our church takes communion, and after services, one family volunteers to provide snacks for a fellowship hour. We signed up for today. Our pastor announced the event with, "As usual, the Stahls got carried away, and there is a whole meal out in the narthex after church. Please stay."

I'm afraid he's right. The tithe on Barry's bonus bought a feast. Barry did a tropical fruit platter of fresh pineapple, two varieties of coconut, and mango; we had a bowl of fresh-picked strawberries from a local grower; there were snow peas with dill dip; there were plenty of smoked turkey sandwiches; and there were little cookies with flags embedded in them (thank you Pillsbury) and a giant Hershey's chocolate bar to chop pieces from. Also punch and coffee. The day was a huge success despite the fact that we had counted on picnicing and had set up tables all over the church's newly planted lawn, only to have it start pouring about 2/3 of the way through Pastor's sermon. So everybody just crammed in and got cozy.

The punch was a variation of what we served at our wedding: Lemon-lime soda and fruit juice, with scoops of rainbow sherbert bobbing around in the punch.

There were lots of leftovers so guess what we'll be living on for the rest of the week?

Helen Zarwell

Two men in our church have lost their wives in as many weeks. Today was Helen Zarwell's funeral. This lovely lady died at age 93 after over 60 years of marriage to her husband Herb (Hub) Zarwell. I cannot even come close to fathoming what it must feel like to be without one's mate after so many years together.

These faithful marriages are such an inspiring witness to those of us who are just starting out. (With our 20th anniversary coming up in August, it may not seem like we are just starting out, but compared to people like the Zarwells, oh yes we are.)