Counting Comforts

I find it funny some of the things that comfort me.

Eating apples on a fall evening. The sound of the furnace running. Oatmeal and peanut butter toast. Venison steak. Preserving food. Eating my preserved food.

And when I really look at all those silly things, they are most obviously tied to my childhood.

When my dad would go deer hunting on a crisp fall Saturday evening, my mom would pack up my brother and me and drive a mile down the road to an orchard where we would buy a bag of our favorite apples. We would go back home and eat a few of the apples while watching the Lawrence Welk show. Sometimes the evening would end in helping Dad track a wounded deer or in hanging a deer from the branch of our swinging tree.

Sundays evenings always meant Mom wasn't going to really cook, so we would all work together to make cocoa and oatmeal and peanut butter toast and eat it while watching America's Funniest Home Videos.

And after we all worked together to butcher a deer and package the meat, we would all savor the flavor and tenderness of some venison chops served with fried potatoes.

All of this, silly little recurring memories, when life was slow and sweet and when your parents weren't graying and wrinkling. The beauty of childhood with parents who gave the real kind of quality time that can only be bred by quantity time and by just doing life together.

So when the "cancer" word creeps back into the family circle and bites so close again, and even when you know God is good and God is in control, and you believe these things but also know that God's goodness spans the breadth of eternity and not just the now, you search out comfort.

On the night when the husband wouldn't be home and there was just one more day 'til the diagnosis would be given and you are feeling just a little lonely, you cook up some venison chops and make oven fried potatoes and soak up the history of those flavors. Even as you cut up little pieces for the plates of the little ones that belong to you, you can see yourself sitting at the small metal table in the old farmhouse of your youth chomping away at deer meat, garden potatoes, and mom's frozen sweet corn. The furnace would kick in and hum its song of warmth, and your world felt secure.

It makes you wonder what moments, what right-now-living-and-breathing moments are becoming the mooring points for your own children. It makes you wonder if you are giving the kind of quality that is birthed from quantity or if you are trying to force the quality to happen.

So you make new traditions of your own, replacing Lawrence Welk with Mike Rowe and Sunday night oatmeal with homemade pizza. You cut out another turkey this year and scribble down everyone's daily thanks. You whip up the waffle batter for the weekly waffles even when you really don't have time and let the kids get all bundled up to go play in the first snow of the year before breakfast.

And everyday you look for God's goodness and slowly learn that His goodness is so more much than what we think. That is what is comforting. I don't have to try to find the silver lining in the cloud. The cloud is the gift. We just don't really understand what "good" is sometimes.

And as happens so often, Ann over at A Holy Experience is saying the same thing better than I am:

"To bring the sacrifice of thanksgiving means to sacrifice your understanding of what is beneficial and thank God for everything because He is benevolent.

A sacrifice of thanks lays down our perspective and raises hands in praise anyways – always.

A sacrifice is by definition not an easy thing.

There is this: We give thanks to God not because of how we feel – but because of Who He is."

{And it's a little sad that you make your family make caramel apples in the near dark with the lights off so that you can shoot at max ISO with the little available natural light to avoid using flash and suffering the horrible white balance issues of the artificial lights in our kitchen. I do think that all the noise works with this series.}

Counting Comforts with everybody else over HERE.

#366. another thing to give to God
#367. another opportunity to let God define what His goodness is
#368. an upcoming 4 day weekend
#369. living close to both sets of parents
#370. venison in the freezer
#371. a bowl of apples on the table
#372. the excitement of children over the first snow of the year
#373. Jack-Jack waking up early the day after all the snow, hearing him come downstairs and stand by the deck door and happily whisper, "Da snow is still dare. Da snow is still dare."
#374. making waffles in pajamas with four extra little helping hands