Advent 2022 - Love

This year I’ve been getting to know someone new. He’s an older guy at work, which is pretty funny since I’m one of the oldest people there now. He is an engineer with lots of high-power experience around the world. He lost his wife of over 30 years earlier this year, then three months later one of his stepsons killed himself. 

This guy loves to read and is pursuing weird subjects, which is right up my alley. He started studying who wrote the Bible - the actual humans, not the Creator of the Universe. He is studying Egyptian knowledge about electricity, remote viewing (which sounds like astral projection), and other things that are a little far out there, even for me. 

A popular saying right now is "Love God, Love Others". Bob Goff's books "Love Does" and others are great reads. I like his writings so much that I've tried to listen to a reading from his devotional "Living in Grace, Walking in Love" each night this past year. I enjoy it but I always worry about stuff like this because of where the Bible teaches not to boil it down to catchy phrases. 

        

There are so many ways to show love to people. One of my favorite ways is to listen to people. In a world with opinions and advertising blaring everywhere listening is sometimes hard but helps me and hopefully helps who I'm listening to. (Like my engineer friend.)

I pray that you find ways to show and experience the love of God this Christmas season!

Bonus stuff: 

Pentatonix “Prayers for this world”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzav80_4kao&list=PLaONuT5QUpidKOBovDhtfzfs8XUndW-8J

Bible Project video on love

https://youtu.be/HV_LUs2lnIQ

Bob Goff’s “Love Does” book:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Does-Discover-Secretly-Incredible-ebook/dp/B0078FA8HU/ref=sr_1_6?crid=2RVITKA108RA4&keywords=bob+goff+books&qid=1669388712&sprefix=bob+goff%2Caps%2C535&sr=8-6

Okra and gumbo ~

Over the past few years I've tried to change my diet so that I eat more vegetables. It's part of the whole "getting healthier" thing that we tend to do as we get older.

My tastes have changed. I used to hate V-8 but now I can drink and actually enjoy it. I used to dislike the taste of green bell peppers but I've eaten the sweet red and yellow and orange peppers enough to where the green bell peppers taste okay to me now. I still prefer them cooked instead of raw but they taste okay.

One of the dishes that I like to make is roasted brussel sprouts. And I really like it! Which surprises me a lot. When I was growing up the only brussel sprouts that I knew came in TV dinners and they were mushy nasty things that I always skipped. But roasted brussel sprouts where they're just getting soft in their little crispy on the outside are delicious to me now. Throw in some mushrooms, onions, and red peppers not the spicy kind and it makes for a really delicious dish!

Recently I wanted to try something different. So I asked my wife to pick up some fresh okra if she could on her next grocery run. And she did.

I love okra when it's fried, but I don't really like okra in a soup or a gumbo. So I cut up the okra into the pieces like I get when they fry it, coated them with some olive oil and spices, and then roasted them like I do the brussel sprouts. They turned out delicious! Good flavor with the whole full okra taste, no sliminess, just goodness. I could've cooked them a little bit longer because some of the pieces were little tough to chew, but that probably explains why most people put them into a soup or gumbo.

It was funny because I was telling a friend from Louisiana about that. He laughed and asked if I knew what the word "gumbo" meant. He told me that okra was one of the few vegetables that was brought over from Africa and is mostly grown in the South. He said that the word "gumbo" is derived from the African word for okra. And so gumbo means okra. He laughed and he said so when people say that they like gumbo but they don't really like the okra he knows that they don't really know the meaning of the word gumbo and the history of the vegetable. Very funny!

Give roasting okra a try. It turned out really well! 400 for 45 minutes in a cast iron skillet worked well for me. Enjoy!

Driving the older car ~

Growing up I watched my dad drive the older car instead of the new one. When we were in Hawaii I remember he bought a Datson when there weren't very many Datsons out there. He spent many weekends tinkering with the car trying to get the distributor cap to work properly and making sure the engine ran because it was not in great shape. It was a very old so I didn't understand very much of what he was doing but I knew he said a lot of bad words while he was doing it.

The only time I remember him having a new or newish car was when we had a Ford Gran Torino. It was a big car but because it was a two-door it was hard for me and my little brother to get in and out of the back seat. We ended up taking a road trip with my grandmother in that car out to the Grand Canyon and back. My dad drove almost the entire time, Grandma was in the front passenger seat taking video with her movie camera of almost every interstate sign that we passed. My brother was six years younger than me so he was probably about four years old or maybe three. Mom sat in the backseat with us, my brother stretched out with his head in her lap. He slept most the time, that left me to sit in the middle between the bucket seats on all watching everything passed by. It was fun!

As I got into my teens we got a Volkswagen Bug. It was an old 1968 model that dad called "Hitler's Revenge" because it never ran right. No air conditioning, corner vent windows that you turned to get the wind as you were flying down the highway. It was fun to drive! I learned how to push a car and pop the clutch to get the engine started in that Volkswagen.

Dad ended up taking my old Ford Pinto when I moved up from it to a Subaru hatchback. I ended up buying the Subaru brand-new but being a four-cylinder engine Dad didn't think it would support air conditioning so I drove around Central Florida with no air conditioning for a couple of years.

But he drove that Ford Pinto for years until it stopped working. He didn't like that car but he drove it.

When he got a truck he bought an old Chevy pickup truck with a manual transmission and the shifter on the steering column. No air conditioning in that, but he loved driving the truck. He drove it all over the place and ended up driving it on a road trip to Tennessee and back.

As he got older he finally bought a new vehicle, a Mercury Grand Marquis. It was smooth and he enjoyed driving ita lot. After he died I got to drive that car for a little while and even though it was older it was still a smooth ride.

Through all of that my dad taught me that driving older vehicles is okay and usually saves money. Good lesson!