Never Underestimate the Power of the Sun

Before I talk about my food art for my recuperating mother, MAJOR NEWS FLASH. It will be above freezing here for the first time in three weeks. It is the first time in three weeks that it has been much above single digits. I am ready to break out the bikini (if I had one, or the body to wear it.) So this leads seamlessly to my food art discussion. Finally, we got in some new breakfast choices to incorporate in my Mission-to-Heal-Mom-Culinary-Creations. I made deviled eggs and cut up strawberries to create this bathing beauty in her green leaf bikini. She has been sun-tanning way too long, and that's why she is red. But who can blame her? Even vegetables know how critical heat is to survival.

Never underestimate the power of the sun.

Lunch was a chicken pinwheel hot rod with a strawberry driver. The hot rod body is a half pear. This might be a personal best, at least in sculptural complexity. I wish there was some sort of cash reward for food art because I would enter.

Look at my cute mama in her new flannel lined jeans. I found them online per a good friend's suggestion for survival in environments above the 39th parallel. The only minor problem was they kept falling down if she walked very far.
"I think they're too big," I said.
"Oh no," she said, "I'll just hang on to them while I walk."
Now that would be fetching... but nothing a good hot wash and tight belt can't fix. You gotta love the cuffs. When Mom's physical therapist came, she noticed the cute cuffs immediately.

After feeding Mom and admiring her new jeans, I headed off to the beauty of the snowy park to cross-country ski. I was so intent on looking down to stay in the tracks I had cut in the deep snow, that I almost missed this view in the picture above. That would be like Mom biting into the deviled egg bikini girl without pausing to notice how carefully crafted it was. Yet, how many times have I been focused on my next difficult step, and lost the joy and wonder of God's creation all around me? How glad I was to have looked up, and seen this remarkably lovely vista.

As I skied, I was thinking about faith. Something about that lovely shrouded sun made me remember how once I didn't know God. None of the Bible made much sense, and I was filled with doubt. But a tiny shard of faith kept poking at me...little unexplained "coincidences," tiny voices that seemed to beckon, little miracles, not to mention the incredible complexity and beauty of the world. I had much doubt and just a flicker of faith. But my cousin Jerry, who urged me to step forth in trusting Jesus told me, "God can use that little seed of faith, and make it grow. Just ask Him."

Jerry was right. Now my faith is as big as the world, and the doubt just a little seed. The Son was no longer shrouded to me, the reality of God no longer in question. I didn't even have to "hang on to my faith so it wouldn't fall down."  God did that for me.

Never underestimate the power of the Son.

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Matthew 17:20 

He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Matthew 13:31-32 

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”