Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

“Oh,Sweetie...”

Part 2

How long does it take for the dirt to settle in a trench that had been twelve feet deep? Estimates vary, but two to five years seems to be the average numbers we saw in our research. I considered these numbers as we went about our plans to put our house on the market. Our realtor suggested an “as is” clause when we finally listed our property. We also had mounded and seeded and watered the filled dirt to show some attempt at reclaiming our front lawn.

In the weeks between the trench digging and the meeting with the realtor, I threw myself a spiritual pity party, one of those “Woe is me! God, You just don't get what we need here.” I've been in places of spiritual despondency before, and I still prayed. Because I've always seen prayer as talking to God, my praying now resembled the difficult conversation one might have with someone close to you that you are in conflict with at the moment. I grumbled and I cried and I sulked and, finally, after a few weeks, I felt spent enough to pray “Oh, Lord, I just want to be able to trust you again.” I immediately felt a peace I had not had for awhile and I “heard” the Lord say to me, “Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...”

Now, I should probably explain that when I say I “heard” the Lord, I don't mean an audible voice. Usually, when I “hear” the Lord, there is a sense of someone - not me - putting words in my mind that I recognize as being too wise for me to have come up with on my own. Often it happens when I am reading scripture and the words jump off the page and take on a wisdom and meaning that I had not seen before. Sometimes there is a new insight and a sense of peace regarding something I'm praying about and I know God is present at that time. And sometimes, like in this instance, there are very clear and surprising words that pop into my head that cause me to say, “God, is that you?”

“Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...”

When I heard those words I was immediately struck by three things almost simultaneously. One was that I knew what I had heard was absolutely true, that I didn't know how to trust God. There was absolutely no feeling of condemnation in the words I heard, only love and tenderness. I really did, at that moment, feel like God's Sweetie, and He was just telling me something that I was finally able to hear, something that I had really needed to know for some time, and now the right time had come for me to receive it. Secondly, I had a glimpse of what true trust in God was for perhaps the first time in my spiritual life. And thirdly – and this took the form of a question to God – what was that thing I had been doing all those years when I thought I had been trusting God?

I started to examine that third thing first. I asked the Lord to show me what I had confused as trust for all those years I thought I had been trusting. What I began to see was that in all the times of my life when I knew I needed to look to God, when I needed to depend upon Him in health crises, relational issues and practical issues, I could only see the passive side of “trust”. I was good at being resigned. I was good at being submitted. I was good at being compliant. I was good at being acquiescent. Acquiescent is defined as accepting something reluctantly but without protest. Yes, I was especially good at that. On the whole, I had seen “trust” as something passive that was put upon me, that I had no choice in, something I reluctantly accepted. And I think God blessed my compliance, my incomplete “trust”, knowing that was all I knew how to give during those times. But was any of this true trust? Now, I had had a glimpse of the active side of trust, true trust as being a joyful movement toward God, an expectation of His hand over my life and an expectation of His working in whatever my situation. Trust now looked like an interesting mix of actively leaning into God and resting in a place of joyful peace rather than passivity.

In the weeks that followed the sewer fiasco, I immersed myself in scriptures about trust and asked God to transition me from the purely passive acquiescent side of trust to the fully active, often joyous side of trust. I was somewhat amused, definitely humbled, and a little embarrassed to be such a latecomer to true trust. I had just celebrated my fiftieth year as a Believer and one of the first scriptures I had ever memorized was Proverbs 3:5, Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. I guess I was trusting the Lord with only part of my heart and leaning on my own understanding to shoulder the rest.

I prayed about and contemplated true trust during that time we were preparing to sell our old home and buy a new one near Minneapolis. I trusted the Lord to bring a buyer that could overlook the mound of now newly greened grass in the front yard. I trusted the Lord to find us a townhome that would meet our needs as we grew older. He sent us twelve viewers on day one of our house listing. He sent us five offers on day two, all above asking price. The one we accepted was high enough to almost fully cover the cost of the sewer replacement, and the new buyer graciously accepted the front lawn in progress. On the Minneapolis end, we found our almost perfect townhome and were able to schedule two closings within a few days of each other. I came
to know that God is good and completely to be trusted. How sweet to be His Sweetie...

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

and he will make straight your paths.

- Proverbs 3:5,6

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

God's Sovereignty Problem – An Opportunity to Trust

Part 1

The puddle around the drain in our unfinished basement was small, barely a foot in diameter, and no larger than the one that appeared in the same place six months earlier. It didn't look like a big deal, and it certainly didn't look like a opportunity to learn a whole new level of trusting God. But it was a big deal, and what I learned about trust was even a bigger deal.

* * *

I thought I'd write a series of Lenten reflections this year about trusting God, what I thought it was and what it probably actually is and why I need it more now than ever. Someone reading this might benefit from my sharing, but, honestly, I really need to write this down for me, to remind myself of how big God is and how worthy He is of my trust. I usually call this series “Light Lenten Reflections” but some of these reflections will be not so light. But back to the puddle in the basement...

* * *

We called the rooter people we had contacted six months previously and told them the puddle was back. This shouldn't be, they said. Something is going on that a simple rooting out won't fix. Within 24 hours, they had dug a trench in our front yard, from front porch, across the lawn, through the road in front of our house and into our neighbor's yard. The trench was twelve feet deep and almost as wide. The sewer pipe running from our basement no longer sloped down to the main sewer line in our neighbor's yard. Over the years, the pipe had settled in such a way that it now sloped from the main sewer line into our basement. The village engineers and various consultants were called in and together with the rooter people came up with a plan to remedy the problem – just redo the entire sewer outlet in our basement, put in 50 feet of large sewer piping that wasn't there previously, knock a hole in the foundation to raise the outlet of the pipe four feet higher than what it was previously. Oh, and because all of the needed work was on our pipe and our property, we'd get to pay for it all!

Now this story might seem like a run-of-the-mill crisis that all homeowner face now and then, though maybe a slightly bigger one than usual. But for me, it was devastating and for a short time seriously affected my relationship with God in what I've come to call His sovereignty problem. If I believe God is sovereign - and I do – then He knew all about this sewer pipe and the gigantic hole in the front lawn and He let it all happen anyway. He knew about the five years leading up to this crisis and how our life had been put on hold so many times in those years. I was not shy about telling God how really, really upset I was that this was happening now, again. Five years earlier, when my husband and I retired, we had made plans to move to the Minneapolis area to be closer to our kids and grandchildren. We started to get rid of stuff and paint rooms. Then I had a cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery. On the road to recovery, but before I could get painting again, I had another cancer diagnosis unrelated to the previous one, and this time it was six months of chemo followed by major surgery and a year's recovery. But recover I did, and as soon as I could climb ladders again, I was back to painting. Then the pandemic hit. In addition to dealing with the problem of showing our house and looking for a new one in the midst of high Covid numbers, did we really want to make the dozen trips to Menards and Home Depot that everyone moving into a new place seems required to make? We decided to put off our move one more time.

Now, with Covid numbers dwindling, we were finally ready to sell our house. In the days before the puddle reappeared, we had started organizing our stuff in the basement in preparation for packing. We were looking at towns in the Minneapolis area we though we might want to move to. We had a realtor picked out and we were ready to put our house on the market...the house with the 50 feet of new sewer pipe in the basement that now had displaced our carefully organized pre-move packing...the house that now had a twelve foot hole in the front lawn...

...I was not happy with God...

Tomorrow

Part 2

Oh, Sweetie...

 

Questions, Questions...I've Got Questions

3,298...

If this were Jeopardy, the category would be titled “Biblical numbers”. The answer would be “What is the number of questions found in the King James Version of the Bible?”

3,298 questions...

The Book of Job is the stand out winner in the question contest with 329. (Surprise, surprise!) Jeremiah has 195 questions, Isaiah, 190, Psalms, 163, 1 Samuel, 157, and Genesis, 149. The gospels contain 630 questions, with Matthew the winner at 177, followed by John at 167, Luke close behind at 165 and Mark trailing with 121.*

Depending on the translation and whether you include the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books in your count, the total number of questions in the Bible may vary, but there is no getting away from the fact that questions and questioning are very biblical. Some of the questions are voiced by the writer of a particular book, others come from the mouth of God, the Yahweh of the Old Testament, the Jesus of the New. It would appear that it is fine with God that we ask Him questions, but it is also expected that we should be fine with God asking us questions as well. Read any of the chapters at the end of the Book of Job. God asks a head-spinning number of questions of Job, more than the many questions that Job had asked God in the early chapters of the book. Just count the question marks in Chapter 36, then count the question marks in Chapters 6 and 7. Lots of questions. Fortunately for Job, this mutual questioning ends well. God takes issue with the way Job's friends spoke about God, but God appears to be fine with all of Job's questioning, saying to Job's friends, “And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (Job 42:8b) Job gets a shout out from the Lord God Himself despite his questioning or, perhaps, because of his questioning. Good news for us as well as for Job: Questioning, if done correctly – face-to-face, before God and toward God – counts as prayer.**

This strange Lenten series has been about asking questions in a Luddite-like manner. The basic questions have been focused on what we let into our lives in the way of technology or even just “stuff” that clutters up our closets or our minds. Some of these questions were: For each new technology - “machine” - we let into our lives, are we losing something valuable, something of quality that the “old way” of doing it provided? How can this loss be avoided? When we can't live without the new technology, how do we decide to adapt, to use it in a way that does not diminish our lives and relationships? To what extent are we in danger of growing “mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand”? And then there is my favorite question: “Will the Kingdom of God be any closer to existing on earth as it is in heaven if I have this tool?” These questions apply to our specific life style choices, but they also hone our skills at asking more complex questions and give us a new comfort level with the process of asking and answering questions on an ongoing deeper spiritual level. So as I end this Lenten Luddite series, I encourage us to take our questions to the next level, to realize that all our questions can be turned into Job-like prayer, sometimes maybe even without the pain and angst. All our questions are better questions when we direct them toward God.

Lord, how much screen time is too much?

Lord, do I really need another book, a new phone? No to the book, yes to phone? I kind of wanted it the other way around.

Lord, what can I do to simplify my life?

What are You calling me to let go of?

What or who are you calling me to connect to?

Lord, where am I going to get the relational energy to connect with all the people you put in my life each day? Did you forget I'm an introvert? Oh, right, you made me that way. You'll l give me all I need to pull it off? Of course. Thanks for the reminder. I'm glad I asked...

*The numbers come from J.L. Hancock's book All the Questions in the Bible as mentioned in Beth Moore's study The Quest.

**I've used the following passage from Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller in my devotional blog posts twice before. Here it is for a third time. Yeah, it's that good, and Job's questions are part of the mix of the doubts and complaints and the yelling and screaming Keller talks about:

But why would God be so affirming of Job? Job cursed the day he was born, challenged God's wisdom, cried out and complained bitterly, expressed deep doubts. It didn't seem that Job was a paragon of steady faith throughout. Why would God vindicate him like that?' The first reason is that God is gracious and forgiving. But the crucial thing to notice is this: Through it all, Job never stopped praying. Yes, he complained, but he complained to God. He doubted, but he doubted to God. He screamed and yelled, but he did it in God's presence. No matter how much in agony he was, he continued to address God. He kept seeking him. And in the end, God said Job triumphed. How wonderful that our God sees the grief and anger and questioning, and is still willing to say “you triumphed” - not because it was all fine, not because Job's heart and motives were always right, but because Job's doggedness in seeking the face and presence of God meant that the suffering did not drive him away from God but toward him. And that made all the difference. As John Newton said, if we are not getting much out of going to God in prayer, we will certainly get nothing out of staying away.

 

Human Connection in a Kiosk World

My husband and I frequent fast food restaurants on an embarrassingly regular basis. Post pandemic, with the rapid rise of ordering kiosks, it has become more and more difficult to order from a person at a register and pay cash for our lunch. We have found that at certain times of the day, if we hang around the register looking like hungry people of a certain age, someone will appear from the kitchen area and take our order the old fashioned way. Since we are regulars at one McDonald's, we tend to see the same young girl emerge from the kitchen to help us. On one visit, after an ordering glitch on the counter register, my husband teased her and said he bet she was wishing we had used the kiosk. She looked at us wide-eyed, slowly shook her head and silently mouthed the word “No!” We all laughed, finished the order and we went on to our table, she back to the kitchen. My husband and I spent lunch speculating on what her emphatic “No!” meant. Had we saved her from some unpleasant task in the kitchen? Did kiosk ordering create more problems behind the scenes than a register order? Or perhaps the very existence of her job depended upon people such as us, hanging around the register looking hungry and kiosk-avoidant.

My husband attends a men's group at another McDonald's where only kiosk ordering is available at the early morning hour they meet. Since he usually orders only coffee, he balks at ordering on the kiosk and paying for one coffee with a credit card. He instead goes through the drive-thru, orders his coffee, talks to a real person who accepts his cash and hands him his coffee. At that hour, the drive-thru is a well-oiled machine and the employees are still fresh on their shifts, and are friendly and happy to serve. My husband then parks his car and carries his coffee inside the restaurant to meet up with his group that has ordered their breakfasts via the kiosk, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

These are just two examples of the last remnants of people-to-people connections that we used to take for granted. True, we probably didn't have meaningful in-depth conversations when ordering past Shamrock Shakes, but we did interact with a real person. Self-checkouts at the library have eliminated the interesting conversations I used to have with the desk clerks about books they read and recommended or questions they had about books I was checking out - “Oh, I read her other book. It was a great read!” “You fly fish!!!??” “I think we just got a new book in you might like.” Self-checkouts at the supermarket and ordering apps on phones also have diminished the number of times a weeks we physically interact with others.

Part of the original Luddite rebellion was due to the fact that the mill owners lost sight of the people they employed, ignoring their concerns and their needs. The Luddite weavers were used to an apprentice-style learning model where people would come alongside others to teach and model what a skilled craftsman should do to produce a quality product. The mill owners were interested mainly in rapid production and cheap overhead and would hire those who could work fast but not necessarily work precisely. They looked at the product rather than the producer. What are some of the Luddite-like questions we need to ask today, when faced with a kiosk, an app, a self-checkout? What are we losing in simple human interaction in this machine-dominated workplace? What are some things we can do to not lose the connection we as human beings are meant to have with each other, even if they are just fleeting moments in our day? To return to Thomas Carlyle's quote from my first post in this series, how have we “grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand?” What choices can we make to change that?

Despite being people of a certain age, my husband and I do, in fact, know how to use an ordering kiosk, a self-serve checkout and the scanners at the library. And, as both of us are high on the introvert scale, it is easy for us to be tempted on some days to avoid the human interaction. The machines around us allow us that option, but it doesn't mean it's good for us. We can choose the traditional checkout, even when they are few and far between. We can interact with librarians and store clerks. We can choose to spend more time looking at people's faces than looking at our screens. We were created to know one another, to interact with the people around us. Some we are called to know in depth, to really know. Others we connect with oh so briefly and superficially, but we are called to that as well. At best we do it all imperfectly, but we were made to do it, to look each other in the eye, to smile, to exchange pleasantries, and on occasion, to shake our heads slowly and mouth an emphatic “No!”

 

Anatomy of a Trout Fisherman

This post has nothing to do with Luddites. It has nothing to do with Lent, but in my last post on books, I promised I'd write this. And since the Angle is “eclectic ramblings from faith to fishing” I thought I was long overdue to write one on fishing, though this may be more about writing than about fishing. It's a close call.

In the previous post I mentioned that my brother regularly sends me his fishing magazines when he is done reading them, and occasionally he will send a fishing book along with the magazines. The last batch of magazines contained an old book he had found in his basement, one that he had had for years but just recently got around to reading. Entitled Trout Madness: Being a Dissertation on the Symptoms and Pathology of This Incurable Disease by One of Its Victims it's a collection of fishing essays written by a life long resident of the upper peninsula of Michigan who wrote under the name of Robert Traver. The book itself was a lovely old hard cover edition that had been published in 1960 and as I was relishing the feel and format of it, I skimmed through it from cover to cover before I began reading it. In the front pages of the book there was the list of other books the author had written. One of them was Anatomy of a Murder which sounded familiar. I tucked the title away in my brain and went on to read the fishing essays.

The author spent most of his life as a lawyer in northern Michigan, a profession that proved flexible enough to allow him the freedom to go fishing whenever the urge to do so arose. And fish he did, through most of the middle of the twentieth century on the streams and ponds of the upper peninsula that were still full of native trout. Trout fishing was his main focus, usually with a fly rod, but not always. One of his essays was about his early experiences fishing the then new invention of the spinning reel. It was a fun read from a historical perspective to hear someone talk of the “free-stripping, fixed-spool, anti-backlash reel,” now a staple of the recreational fishing industry and the go-to for most fisherpersons today. Traver gives an in-depth critique of the newfangled reel, its pros and cons, finally coming to the realization that he doesn't dislike the spinning rod and reel so much as he just likes fly fishing so much better. I can relate.

There are twenty one essays in this collection, most amusing, some poignant. One of the longer ones, entitled “The Intruder” I read three times, I was so moved by the story. Two strangers run into each other many years apart on a beautiful secluded trout stream with a world war and its devastating effects intervening between the two meetings. They don't recognize each other at first, one has been so altered by the war, but they finally recognize each other in their fishing. Another more amusing essay gives a glimpse of the author's quirky father who builds a canal in an attempt to connect the family lake to a nearby trout stream hoping the trout stream will feed its fish into the lake. After much work, the canal is completed, and the lake, much to everyone's chagrin, now flowed into the stream instead.

It was this last essay that caused me to go down a literary rabbit trail that proved to be as much fun as reading this book. The author is called Johnny in this essay and in several others. Why wasn't he called Robert or Bob? Also, why does Anatomy of a Murder sound so familiar? Thanks to Wikipedia, I found out that Robert Traver is the pen name of John D. Voelker, Robert being the name of John's sibling who died in World War I, Traver being his mother's maiden name. Since John Voelker did much of his writing while an elected county attorney, he thought using another name would be best. In the 1950s he wrote a novel based on one of his cases where he successfully used a rare form of the insanity defense. The novel, Anatomy of a Murder, became a bestseller in 1958. Even more popular was the 1959 movie of the same name, made by Otto Preminger, scored by Duke Ellington and starring Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick, eventually nominated for seven Academy Awards. No wonder the title sounded familiar. It was also the first movie to be entirely filmed on location, using Voelker's home office for some scenes, his home town of Ishpeming, Michigan, and the nearby towns of Marquette and Big Bay.

My next rabbit trail was more geographical. The essay where John's father tries to connect the family lake to a trout stream via a canal made me curious – could I find the lake on Google maps? Called Lake Traver in the essay, I took a wild guess that maybe it was called Voelker Lake in reality since John's father took such pride in having the family name formally appear on maps of the local lakes. Sure enough, there is no Traver Lake, but there is a Voelker Lake a few miles south of Ishpeming. The map also shows a nearby trout stream. I even convinced myself I could see the remnants of the ill-fated canal.

John Voelker lived most of his life in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He spent his time fishing, writing and, when necessary, being a lawyer. He was a county prosecuting attorney, a sometimes assistant to the Michigan Attorney General and served several years as a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court. After the success of Anatomy of a Murder, he retired from law and spent his time writing and, of course, fishing. In one of his essays, he talks lovingly about his “fish car”, a small sedan he kept permanently stocked with everything necessary for a day of fishing. And there were many. According to the Wikipedia entry, a close friend claimed John spent five or six days a week fishing for twenty years. It's a wonder he had time to write.

 

The Pages of a Dilemma

True confession: I'm a big fan of the Libby app. This app searches through all the available books in our metro library system - 168,565 of them at the moment. With a few clicks of the mouse on my laptop, one of those books will magically appear on my Kindle and I am ready to read. There is plenty more reading material available if I include magazines and even more if I am willing to place a hold and wait days, weeks, often months for some popular bestseller. Best of all, I can do all this without leaving the house or the couch. I can, and have, done it at midnight. If I leave home without my Kindle, presto! - said book also appears on my phone, saving me from the boredom of a doctor's waiting room. Because there is so much technology tied up in this reading process, I've wondered what Luddite thinking would be in this instance. I've yet to come up with a clear answer.

As good as I have become about asking all the right Luddite questions before acquiring material items, I've never been able to use the same degree of wisdom and prudence when it comes to reading materials. Maybe it's my addiction to knowing stuff, that little girl in me, reading encyclopedias on the dining room floor still can't get enough book knowledge. For most of my life, when it comes to acquiring books, my frugal and restrained buying nature is nowhere to be found. I lived for my Scholastic books orders as a child. My own children learned early on that the Mom who would say no to a toy or a candy bar would almost always say yes to a book. I remember a day when I went out on a focused mission to find a pair of shoes to wear to a wedding. I came home without the shoes, but somehow had managed to buy a large number of books. When it came to our latest move, the one where we did the retirees' downsize from the large family home to the townhouse, books were the hardest thing to let go of. I was brutal, so I thought, reducing my books by more than half. Nevertheless, our new bedroom still looks like a library. I made the decision not to acquire any more books. I made a decision to read more e-books, and any paper books that entered the house would be from local libraries or those lovely neighborhood boxes that function as book exchanges. There, for every book I'd take, I'd feel obliged to leave one of my own. Or so that was how I hoped it would work. I sometimes still pick up a book at a thrift store, but again, try to pass it on to the neighborhood book exchange when I am finished.

The interesting thing I found about e-books vs. paper books is that I read each differently. The Kindle format makes for quick efficient eye movements and lightning fast page turning and, as a result, I read faster. I can read in the dark without an added light source. Bookmarking allows me to immediately go to the page I left off on, a mixed blessing in that I don't see the book cover, causing me to often ask “Who wrote this again?” or sometimes “What is the title of this book?” I often lose all sense of the length of a book. Not being able to see and feel the physical presence as with a paper book, I'm dependent on the page numbers at the bottom of my Kindle screen. These numbers have their own funny accounting for length of book, and I forget they often include pages and pages of notes and appendices and indexes at the end of the book. I'm sometimes  blindsided by the abrupt end to the body of the book - “That's it? I'm done?”

My brother regularly sends me his fishing magazines when he is done reading them, and occasionally he will send a fishing book along with the magazines. The last batch of magazines contained an old book* he had found in his basement, one that he had had for years but just recently got around to reading. It caused me to revisit the joys of real physical paper books. This hard covered book, published in 1960, had the lovely fabric binding and faded teal color of that era. I enjoyed the content of the book immensely, but it was the format, the font, the slightly yellowed pages and the feel of a real book in my hand that I really savored.

That handed-down book made me realize that though I like to read and I like the instant and wide access that e-books provide, I really do love printed paper books, their look, their feel, the way the page turns and the flipping back and forth to reread or look ahead to find out what is going to happen next and when. I think that is why my go-to Bible is a compact ESV reference Bible with a soft binding, a single satin marker ribbon and a beat up fabric cover. Yes, I use biblegateway.com as my quick-look-something-up concordance, and I do have the YouVersion Bible app on my phone so I look younger than my years when I read along with the sermon scriptures in church on Sunday mornings. And maybe the Luddites, with some time travel, and after applying their questions to the merit of non-paper books - Are we losing something valuable, something of quality by embracing this new technology and does it diminish or enhance our lives? - would surprisingly settle down on the side of the e-book. But as for me, when it comes to settling down in extended time with the Author of the Book, reading psalms, doing some lectio divina, maybe going through a Lenten devotional, I want to be able to feel a real book in my hands. Does that make me a Luddite or not? Hence, the dilemma.

*The book, Trout Madness: Being a Dissertation on the Symptoms and Pathology of This Incurable Disease by One of Its Victims – of course intrigued me. It contained a series of essays on trout fishing in the upper peninsula of Michigan written by a life-long resident who wrote under the name Robert Traver. It also led me on a fun investigative rabbit trail that I'll put in another post soon.

 

Living Without

The Plain Reader tells a story of a city person moving to a more rural home in an Amish community. On moving day, the Amish neighbors show up to help the new family unload their truck and carry the boxes into the house. One Amish man, after carrying a number of boxes containing small electric appliances, approached the newcomer and told him that if any of those appliances should break down, call him and he would come right over. The city person, already impressed with the helpfulness and community spirit of his new neighbors, was amazed that an Amish person would also know how to repair a coffee maker or a food processor. He expressed his wonder that his neighbor could fix such things. No, said the Amish man, I have no idea how to repair them, but I can show you how to live without them.

The Luddites knew how to weave fabric without the use of the new powered looms of the early Industrial Revolution. Unlike the Amish, they also knew something about how those new looms operated, and many Luddite weavers could use the powered looms to produce a quality product. But like the Amish neighbor, they knew how to live and survive and even thrive without them. My question for us is: Can we? Do we know how to live and thrive without some of the gadgets we have grown so dependent on? Are we willing to take a look at what we have and what we really need in the way of the “modern conveniences” of our present age?

I am fortunate that I have a heredity of “plain” living, being descended from Hutterites, an Anabaptist community related to the Amish and Mennonites.* Being raised by grandparents who were both of Hutterite descent, I grew up in a household that asked Luddite-like questions, though I'm pretty sure we had no idea who the Luddites were. As a young child I spent a lot of time with my grandmother who was very good at knowing what one could live without. Once, when grocery shopping with Grandma, I asked if we could buy a cake mix. I was attracted by the luscious photos on the boxes and thought they must taste as wonderful as they looked. Grandma told me cake mixes were only for rich people, and besides, didn't she bake some kind of dessert from scratch every day? Fitted sheets were also for rich people, so I learned to make a bed with flat sheets and hospital corners. I watched soap operas with Grandma on days I was home from school and I would often suggest we might want to try some product that was being advertised during the commercials. Grandma would then look at me as though she doubted I had any common sense at all. She would go on to explain, again, that commercials were made by people who would lie to you just to get you to buy something you didn't need in the first place. Her negative attitude toward the earnest efforts of Madison Avenue had its desired effect on me. Cynical child that I had become, I now watched commercials looking for the subtle lies those crafty advertisers were using to get me to buy things I did not want need.

Thanks to Grandma, I eventually grew into an adult relatively immune to the wiles of advertising. I learned I could live without many things. I learned to ask the questions: Do I really need this? Will it really make my life better/easier/more fulfilling? And do I have room for it? Years later, thanks to Anthony Bourdain's edict in his book Kitchen Confidential, I learned I could have a fully functioning kitchen with only one high quality knife.** This revelation confirmed my already growing suspicion that so many kitchen “necessities” might not be necessary at all.

When I was first married, my baking utensil collection consisted of a hand cranked rotary egg beater and a wooden spoon. I choose to forego the large stand mixer, even the hand held mixer, though I did acquire one many years later. I prepared cookie dough and cake batter with a wooden spoon, and if I needed to beat egg whites or whip cream, I took out the rotary egg beater. When my children were young and one of them would eat only carbs, I spent a year baking all of our own bread It was the heyday of the bread machine, but I made bread with only a covered mixing bowl, a wooden spoon and two bread pans. Added bonus – I found the kneading process extremely cathartic. I would have missed all that stress relief of pounding dough onto a floured counter if I had given into a bread machine.

Today, I do own a hand-held electric mixer I use to make cakes as well as whipping egg whites and cream. I have a food processor which I rarely use. After asking all the appropriate Luddite-like questions, I did see my way to purchasing an immersion blender last year which really can do amazing things and has made me consider giving away my food processor. We also own a coffee maker which is my husband's go to for morning coffee and making large amounts of coffee when we have company. I prefer a low tech plastic Melitta brewing cone and paper filter for the best pour-over for one person. My two most used, go-to kitchen “gadgets”, however, are still a good sturdy wooden spoon and a hand cranked rotary grater, the kind that looks like a Klingon warship.

I'm sure there are other things around the house that we have let in over the years that are not absolutely necessary to having a meaningful, productive life – electric tooth brushes, milk frothers, blenders, electric pencil sharpeners, probably other items that have come and gone as they have outlived their dubious usefulness. But I like to think that if the existing conveniences we still have were to break down, we wouldn't need an Amish neighbor to show us how to live without them. Hopefully, we are on our way to figuring it out for ourselves.

*My other blog - https://habanrus.blogspot.com – is all about my Hutterite heredity.

**He says a cook only needs one good chef's knife. He does acknowledge that most people do not have the skills to use a chef's knife as a paring knife so he would allow the home cook one paring knife. And if you insist on a third knife, let it be one for slicing bread. But no knife sets, please!