do you see it?

London so far...

God was very sweet to me and blessed me with weekend plans my first week here! Last night at dinner, here are the things that I wrote down to look up:

- Sophie Dahl (after a conversation about cook book authors and me gushing over Nigella). Apparently she's in the same vein as Nigella, full of sensuousness and femininity while(st) cooking. Love. From the BBC's write food website for her recipes (here): "After the success of both a novella and a full-length novel, Sophie published her first cookery book, Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, in 2009. The recipes were inspired by Sophie’s childhood memories and the travelling she did as a model. Some of the book’s recipes were brought to the screen for BBC2’s The Delicious Miss Dahl, broadcast the following year."

of come to think of it, I do remember her being a famous plus-size model. Yay for femininity!

- BBC's Good Food website (here):* apparently fantastic recipes. we'll see if it usurps williams-sonoma as king of my stove.

- TV show: My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. A new friend was talking about gypsies who get married around 16 and cook and clean and have children for the rest of their lives. unsurprisingly their wedding day is the best day ever. and completely crazy because they are planned by 16 year old girls and encompass the fantasies of 16 year old girls. (favorite picture here). turn about is fair play and i shared with them the glories of I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. Bam!

*yay for English hilariousness - in registering on the Good Food website, it offers you the option of "Master" for your title along with Mr. and Miss and everything else normal. Hahahha.

Christ and the Church: marriage counseling

Pondering the ideas of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, author of Hold Me Tight), I have started to wonder what ideas might be translated into our faith relationships with Christ. The Bible uses the marriage metaphor over and over to describe the relationship between Christ and the Church. Why not use the helpful truths of marriage counseling to help our relationships with Christ?

This came into my head first as one of those lame jokes that only you would understand. Christ and the Church in couples therapy. Haha.

But then I started thinking. In my old small group of 17 year old high school girls, they would bring up a question that would stump me: what do to in your relationship with God when you don't feel like he's there and don't really care about it? If the problem just included the first part - not feeling like God's there - but you DID care about it, there's a whole range of counsel a youth leader could provide: the promises of God in scripture, the evidence of his care for you in your life, etc.

Book Report: 'Hold Me Tight'

Now that I have plenty of time on my hands, being unemployed, I am reading the books that I have heard about or have been assigned that I have never had the time to read until now. One of those is Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Dr. Sue Johnson. It was assigned for my Marriage and Family Counseling class at seminary and my professor said it was spot-on.

so far:

"Distressed partners may use different words but they are always asking the same basic questions, 'Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you come when I need you, when I call?'"

"Distress in a relationship adversely affects our immune and hormonal systems, and even our ability to heal. In one fascinating experiment, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University had newlyweds fight, then took blood samples over the next several hours. She found that he more belligerent and contemptuous the partners were, the higher the level of stress hormones and the more depressed the immune system. The effects persisted for up to twenty-four hours. In an even more astounding study, Kiecolt-Glaser used a vacuum pump to produce small blisters on the hands of women volunteers, then had them fight wit their husbands. The nastier the fight, the longer it took for the woman's skin to heal." (p.25)

-- I discussed this last one with Alexis and Allie the other day and Alexis said that this makes sense because when we are loved we are more like whom we are supposed to be - like pre-Fall garden perfect, when we could experience the full loving relationship that we had with God.

jono loves this lecture:

the past couple months or so jono and i have been talking about work/life balance. talking to allie and sharon a couple days ago, i remembered making a vow to myself in middle school to live a life where i wasn't stressed out. i've gotten mediocre grades and don't really have a "career," per se. but i'm happy and I have friends and family that I love. i don't really think that that vow should define my life - avoiding anything that might stress me out. and i obviously forgot that i made it. but i do think that life has been a little better (in some ways) because of that vow.

best cake ever!

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

The idea that everything references everything is an interesting one to me. It goes along with the "there's nothing new under the sun" idea. I have more ideas about this but I'm way too busy packing for London. Maybe later.