Unseasoned

It's been awhile since I posted a blog. Perhaps I just needed some "down time", as we all do. Perhaps all of the high season-high church-high energy escapades of Advent and Christmastide got the best of me. It happens to us all.

So now we find ourselves at the beginning of one of the "ordinary times" in our liturgical life. Perhaps, just like most of us, the church year needed some "down time". But, contrary to what some may think, this is not "dead time"--anything but. In fact, it is during these periods of relative dormancy that we, like all living things, grow, gathering the nutrients for the seeds of faith to sprout.

When I started this blog, I named it "Seasonings". If someone just found it in a Google search, they might think it had to do with cooking. Well, maybe in a way. After all, any good cook knows that it's all in the "seasonings", in what you add to it, in the flavors that you choose to enhance what is already there. I mean, really, admit it, with the exception of bread pudding (a somewhat cumbersome project when done right), most foods pretty much make themselves. But the flavor comes in what the cook adds. What the dish becomes has to do with the seasonings. And, like a good cook, we people of faith know that we have been given all the ingredients that we need. At our core, we've been given life and gifts and resources by a God who loves us more than we can even fathom, by a God that has much bigger things for us planned than we dare to imagine. And it is up to us to add the seasonings, those things through which our own flavor comes to be.

This Season of Epiphany is a "down time"--a "low season" if you will. But, really, after all of those highly seasoned and rich foods of Christmas, how many of us were ready for just some good old macaroni and cheese. It's called comfort food. But as we bask in the comfort of this low and ordinary season, we will find our epiphanies. We will find who we are. We will find that core that we've been given. And we will prepare for the seasonings to come. As for me, my spice cabinet is full, I have several live herb plants hanging on even through the relatively mild Texas winter, and I have six kinds of pepper and three kinds of salt ready for anything!

So go forth and season your soul!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli