Pastry Flop

This last week, we had the privilege of hosting our youth sponsors team at our house and had some pulled beef sandwiches, pasta salad and dessert!  Pie by the Mile!  Basically is pastry dough spread over a cookie sheet, pie filling in-between and then more dough on top.  Altogether, one big pie the size of a cookie sheet.

To get the pastry dough recipe, Colleen messaged her mother and got the recipe, which called for one pound of shortening.  If you know shortening packages, one pound is a whole container.  She mixed the dough and while kneading it commented that it felt very moist, yet broke apart when rolling like it was too dry.  We called my mother-in-law to find out what we should do, add more flour, or more liquid because we were at a loss of what to do.  "Oh, I think the recipe calls for 1 cup of shortening, not one pound.  (The difference is that 1 cup is about 1/4 of a package)

We did not want to make 4 times the pastry dough, so I went googling on the internet to find out what we can do to solve our problem.  The best answer I got, and really the only one, was to throw it out and start over.  "There must be a way to salvage something good out of that dough," I thought, but alas, it was a lost cause.  We threw it out, I went to the store to get more shortening (as we had used up the whole package on the last batch) and we started fresh.

The pie was delicious and worked out great and we had a encouraging time preparing for the coming year at Youth group!

As I was running to the store for more shortening and disappointed previous dough was hopeless, I began thinking about being a Christian in this world.

Often I look at myself and desire to "save" my flesh; I want to hold onto those things I am called to give up.  I keep insisting that they are not necessarily bad, but can be made good if I just try hard enough.  But, as I remember the pastry dough, there is no saving the flesh, it must be thrown away and burned in the fire.

1 Peter 2:11 states that the fleshly desires we have war against our souls.  We my think and try to take the things that are not from God and try to make them good, but it is clear, they war against us.

Kindof like Adam and Eve in the garden where eve saw the fruit was pleasing, good tasting and helpful in gaining wisdom yet, the act of eating it destroyed their relationship with God.

It is a pretty simple formula, if it is of the flesh, destroy it, and of God, embrace it.

Yet so difficult in practice, as even as we look at the war happening in Ukraine - simple in concept, but yet so complex and confusing.