I Think I’ll Make Muffins

My evenings are filled with busyness—dinner and laundry and tediously long bedtime routines. School lunches and permission forms. Trying to find time to play marbles and play-doh and colour. Even when the kids are finally asleep, which is later and later these days, the guinea pigs won’t leave me alone; chirping and squeaking for a snack.

Daytime is taken up with other work—that feature story I’ve been meaning to work on for months; planning out the issues ahead; endless emails; the church newsletter; and dreams of travelling and con-ed courses and worrying if the bread recipe I’m attempting for the first time is going to rise alright.

But what of my month of purging and de-cluttering and buying less? I continue to purge (and will do so for months, I assume). Lately I’ve been tackling the piles of magazines I have squirreled away in various spots. I’ve been thinking about redecorating a few rooms in our home, and am wondering how best to re-use and re-purpose things I already own, rather than just rushing out and buying new.

It truly is a daily grind. Trying to be conscious of all the things we do on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. Are they necessary? Are they extravagant? Do they help others? Do they hinder? What do they teach my kids about possessions and want and need and greed?

My almost three-year-old still loves a certain four-letter word: More! More games, more songs, more broccoli (seriously!). For her, thankfully, it hasn’t yet turned to “more toys!” I wonder when it will?

Often when I’ve got too much on my mind, or am frustrated, disappointed, overwhelmed or angry, I head for the kitchen, grab my wooden spoon and one of many spatulas (like coats, I have a lot of them), and get baking. I find the step-by-step process to be calming. (When I can, I eschew any type of small appliance, choosing instead the slower but more satisfying manual labour route. I almost always whip cream by hand with a whisk instead of with a mixer.) Very often, while doing this, my next column or story or blog post will begin to take shape in my head; mentally writing each line as I measure the flour, crack the eggs, gently stir the dough.

It is a time for contemplation; a time to make sense of the busyness; a time for thinking about could’ves and should’ves and figuring out how to turn them into will-do-next times.

It is a time to be silent.

Phil Reinders, minister at Knox, Toronto, author of Seeking God’s Face: Praying with the Bible Through the Year, and writer of the Record’s Spiritual Disciplines column (which you really should read; it’s quite soul-stirring) speaks of silence this way:

“The biggest takeaway from my silent retreat was the simplest and sweetest. It was the experienced knowledge that Christ lives in me. … Yet silence’s sweet reward is demanding. The trouble with turning down the volume on our mouths is that every other sound seems cranked up.

“And here lies silence’s biggest challenge—in the quiet we encounter ourselves, all those movements of the heart we regularly dodge in all the noise of life. … But this is its important work. Silence is like the frost heave of the soul. The cold contraction of earth regularly hoists to the surface rocks and stones. Silence has this same habit, lifting subterranean rubble to the surface of our lives that we need to confess and clear out. No wonder we fill our lives with noise and distraction.”

February will bring new challenges; a whole new month of other goals; other ways to change the world. For now, I’ll get started on some muffin-making (these should do the trick.) A warm snack when the girls get home from school and daycare.

Time to rest. Time to contemplate. Time to renew as I ready for a much more challenging month of becoming an ordinary radical.

Until next time,

Amy

Photo: “Couldnt find loaf pan, hence banana bread muffins. (5613724687)” by Jules Morgan from Montreal, Canada – Couldn’t find loaf pan, hence banana bread muffins.Uploaded by Fæ. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.