learning from past

Post-Party Analysis

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pile of utensils, ingredients, and bowls on a cluttered kitchen counterAlthough I’ve temporarily discontinued my posting on the “Intentional Hospitality” blog I’m still cooking away. Last night I provided the desserts and punches for my church’s Christmas banquet. This turned out to be yet another one of those “I-thought-I-was-going-to-have-an-easy-time-of-it-but-I-was-wrong” episodes in my life. I had made my famous orange-almond biscotti before the Cherry Creek Chorale’s concert over a week ago with the intention of putting them together into tree shapes held together by frosting, but I just ran out of steam and time, so I ended up putting the baked biscotti into the freezer with the intention of building the trees for this party.

 I kept thinking, ‘I have the biscotti made, so all I have to do is make the cranberry tarts and the chocolate peppermint crunch cookies. I’ll do that Sunday afternoon and still have time to clean up the kitchen.’ What was I smokin’? I worked like a dog all afternoon just to get everything made and still ran out of time for making the frosting for those blasted biscotti. Some very helpful people who came early pitched in, and one woman suggested that we could stack the biscotti plain. I wish I had a picture of the beautiful platter she made. People were saying, “You’re doing Jenga!” It was great.

Well, all was well in the end. I could have done a lot more prep on Saturday and saved myself having a nervous breakdown Sunday. But the important thing is that everything was on the tables, ready to go, and that people had a good time. I’ve now gotten through my two big parties for December, but there’s more to come on the family front. My sister- and brother-in-law get here Friday, and we’ll have many get-togethers during the week they’re here. So I’ll have lots of opportunities to either a) procrastinate or b) be proactive (pro-acticate?).

If the items mentioned above sound intriguing, I do have posted recipes for three of them. Here are the links:

​For the biscotti trees: “A Beautiful Celebratory Dessert”

For the cranberry tarts and pink egg nog: “Second Time Is the Charm!”

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Are You Bearing an Unnecessary Forgiveness Burden?

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Cow struggling to pull a cart loaded with sacks For some reason I’ve been thinking lately about the whole concept of forgiveness, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of inaccurate info out there on it. (Astounding, I know.) How does this apply to happiness, you ask? Forgiveness, rightly understood, is a key component. It is impossible to be happy if you’re walking around stewing about something somebody did to you.

You also can’t be happy if you’re carrying around load of guilt because you’re trying to forgive a wrong in the wrong way.

So let’s take a look at three correctives to these forgiveness mistakes:

 1. You can’t forgive on the behalf of someone else.

Remember way, way back when the “Access Hollywood” tapes surfaced, with a ten-years-younger Donald Trump bragging about assaulting women?

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Time to Learn Emotional Hygiene?

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There’s a program on NPR called “The TED Radio Hour.” I was listening to it yesterday as I drove across town to a concert. Fascinating! Here’s the entire TED talk that’s referenced in the show. Note here that I (although perhaps not Dr. Winch) would make a distinction between mental/emotional health on the one hand and spiritual health on the other. But I found his ideas to be very intriguing. Be sure you listen to the whole thing. He has some great stories!

Are You Philip or Andrew?

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Wood carving of Jesus Feeding the 5000The Bible is far more than just a storybook, a collection of moralistic tales. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fascinating lessons to be learned, along with the vastly more important doctrinal issues.

So, as I’ve said about five million times, I belong to a wonderful Bible study organization, Bible Study Fellowship International.

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Did I Build a Structure?

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2 workmen building a foundation

I wrote last week about the fact that structure, properly used, can set us free to do what we really want to do. Knowing the intricacies of a musical composition so well that you’ve built muscle memory means that when you actually get up to perform you can focus on the performance. Your structure is in place; you can now build on that.

So, this past weekend I was once again in charge of the retreat breakfast for my wonderful, wonderful chorale.  I would say there were at least 75 people there. It ain’t quite the same as running a Presidential campaign, but still!

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How to Grow a Mustache

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Mr. Money Mustache:  Financial Freedom through Badassity, mrmoneymustache.com.  by Pete, no last name given.  No, that’s not him in the picture.

Yet again this week there’s a blog instead of a book.  I promise that next week I’ll post about a book.  (I’m in the midst of reading it right now, in between my stints on the MMM website.)  And, another yet again, I don’t know how I ran across this site.  The power of Google, I guess.  Mr. Mustache addresses the age-old question of whether or not money can buy happiness.  The answer is:  only if you use the money to buy freedom instead of things.  (And why a mustache?  Well, guess you’ll have to check out the blog for yourself.)

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“Let Me Burn Out for Thee, Dear Lord,”

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Burn and wear out for Thee.  Don’t let me rust, or my life be a failure, dear Lord, for Thee.”  Bessie F. Hatcher, 1957.

This song is part of my spiritual DNA.  I grew up hearing it at my church and later on at the Christian university I attended.  I always found it to be affecting . . . and daunting.  However sincere the author may have been–and I’m sure that she was– her words induced more guilt than inspiration, for me at least.

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What Are Your Limits?

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At 9:00 last night I told Jim that I was going to take a look at a documentary that was airing on our PBS station but that I thought I probably wouldn’t watch much of it, as it sounded pretty depressing.  The title of the film was “The Overnighters” and was described as telling the story of a Lutheran pastor in a small North Dakota oil-boom town who opens up his church to let men sleep there who have come to find work and have nowhere else to go.  Usually these films in the series “POV” are an hour long, but it was clear at 10:00 that we had a ways to go, and I was fading fast.  When I turned off the TV last night I figured that I knew pretty much what was going to happen to Jay Reinke and his program; today I went online to watch the remainder and found out the rest of the story.

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Can “Serial” Add to Your Happiness?

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image from Serial website

Just in case you don’t know what “Serial” is:

In 1999 an 18-year-old Baltimore girl named Hae Min Lee was murdered and her body found in a park not far from her high school.  Her ex-boyfriend, a Pakistani Muslim named Adnan Syed, was arrested and charged with the murder; no other suspect was ever considered.  The first trial ended in a mistrial; the second trial ended in a guilty verdict and Syed has been incarcerated in a supermax prison ever since.  A family friend and lawyer tried to get attention paid to the poor job done by the defense and the many inconsistencies in witness testimony, but she was unsuccessful in her efforts until she decided to try bringing the story to the media in some way.  She contacted a journalist named Sarah Koenig who became interested and ended up doing a 12-part podcast on the case, titled “Serial.”  This series exploded in popularity, with 68 million downloads on iTunes alone.

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