Exercising Faith

We love our new lawn service. With all the rain, horses were left to graze around our house sine the yardmen from Federal couldn't get in. Lucky us!

Horses are so....something. What do you call it? Majestic? Graceful? Intelligent? Perceptive? I guess compared to cows, all those words fit.



Is that a lemon meringue pie sitting next to home made rolls?


It sure looks like it. So beautiful, so longed for. We've wanted to make lemon meringue pie since Thanksgiving but couldn't find corn starch. We even tried to make our own corn starch, but that was a disaster. (We ended up with crystallized corn syrup instead.) So, when our son Aaron searched our blog for items he could surprise us with, he brought corn starch with him to Buenos Aires a few weeks ago. How thrilling! Our own corn starch!

So, for Amy's Birthday (a day late due to no electricity on Monday and the need to do laundry on Tuesday) we worked together and made empanadas, rolls, and a delicious looking lemon meringue pie.


One bite, and we ran to the new bag of (what we thought was) sugar to discover the problem. It was not sugar at all but rather salt. We've been storing salt in the freezer for months to keep sugar ants away and it was salt all along...two bags of salt!

We've had sugar/salt stories before but this one takes the cake. (Okay, pun intended)

At least the rolls and empanadas had sugar not salt, and we have more corn starch to try again. It's taken another five days to get back to the store for sugar, but this week should bring another mouth watering pie that tastes as good as it looks.

Thoughts from Gregg:

When one of life's vicissitudes is not what we expected, how should we respond? The following is taken from LDS.org

Steve Jones knew what he was going to do with his life. He was going to be a stand-up comedian. God gave him the natural ability-the flair for making people laugh. Life was good until he got married and life started to get real. He now needed an adult job, one that would offer a consistent pay check, hours and heath insurance. He took on a 9 to 5 job with health insurance. After the first day of boredom he reassessed his decision.

He believes God cares about what we do with our lives, and wants to help us but expects us to act. He expects us to do something about our dreams. After thinking and praying, he came up with a question he now lives by. "Will this matter in 1,000 years?" So, he quit the job and focused on the dream of being a high school religion teacher. I applied for the program, threw myself into student teaching, and did acting and entertainment gigs on the side.

When it came time for them to hire, he got an email that read, "I regret to inform you ..." he was crushed. In this program, when you get a "no", it's usually pretty final and you shouldn't try again. Even though he had't been hired, they said he could continue to student teach and wait to see if something opened up which he did.

Toward the end of his student teaching, he was finally offered a job out of state. It didn't feel right to either he or his wife. they graciously turned them down, kept student teaching. and saw the debts mount up.

However, he realized this was "who I am--this is what is going to matter for me in 1,000 years. I need to teach and it felt right. And... it was hard." The acting gigs started to dry up. he began to wonder if his faith and hope in God was even working.

And then the answer. Two months after saying "no", the phone rang. He was offered a job near where they lived, right when he needed it, right at his lowest. After that call, he looked up and said, "I trust you, I trust you."

Steve declared, "God knew me. He had answered my prayers. But He made me wait on it. He made me stretch. The point is if you trust Him, He will deliver, because He looks out for us today, tomorrow, 1,000 years from now, and for eternity."

So what are you worried about right now that's not going to matter in 1,000 years? And what are you going to do that's going to matter in 1,000 years? Answer those questions. Ask Father in Heaven for help and clarity. And then trust Him.

Because sometimes the greatest "failures in life" turn out to be just what we needed.