on redirection and dreams.

Tonight in Lifespan Development, Ted showed us a couple videos from Britain's Got Talent.
One of the clips was Shaheen Jafargholi's audition. If you choose not to watch the video, and I hope you do, let me describe it. Shaheen comes onstage planning to sing "Valerie" as sung by Amy Winehouse. (It was one of the songs that they sang on "Glee" at the first competition this season. Santana sang the solo.) He starts out wonderfully. Clearly, this kid is good. But before he can get very far, Simon stops him. Devastation. I can only imagine how crushed Shaheen felt. Simon asks if he has something else prepared. Michael Jackson. He rocks an M.J. song. All he needed was some redirection.

Ted was super preachy tonight, so he talked about how God sometimes redirects our passions.

Yep, that has been happening in my life.
Last January, I wrote about the woman I thought I wanted to be. Because of my love for baking and making people happy, and my desire to get married, I gave up some passion. Looking back, the life that I wanted to live was not a very good life, nor was it really what God was calling me to.

Last Sunday, Pastor Jay talked about idols and challenged us to write down something that God was calling us to give up. I had been trying for so long to give up my desire to find out who my future husband is. I wrote that down and put it in the flowerpots at the front. I prayed so hard. That was true repentance. And it was only by the grace of God.

Since then, God has been so good. For the past couple of months, my dream was to the wife in a husband-and-wife music team. This, of course, depended on my husband being a musician. And that wasn't going to work.

So.

The Hopeful Epicurean.
That is the name of my bakery/coffee shop.
This summer begins my at-home training and recipe development. And, I hope, the start of sales.

I have a new dream that doesn't depend on having a husband.
It only depends on God. And that is a wonderful place to finally be.

the feet that saved my life

I started writing this post about a year ago, but never got around to finishing and posting it. So here we go.

Last night I had to do an assignment for Perspectives in Fine Arts about Michelangelo's Pieta. The Pieta is a sculpture depicting Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding her son after the Crucifixion.
I was feeling pretty lazy and didn't want to go to the library to actually look through the book, so I just looked online. Much of the conversation I found had to do with the young face of Mary. She does not look to be the mother of a man who had lived for over 30 years, even if she was only 12 years old when he was born.
I thought that maybe I could just choose a photo of a front view and talk about several aspects of the sculpture. But I decided that it would be a good idea to actually look through the book.
I stood at the desk at the library and went through page by page. Nothing jumped out at me until I got to page 63: photos of Jesus' feet. I was reminded of a picture my dad took of his own feet underwater a couple summers ago. It was on his desk and I asked him why. He said that it was a reminder that he wasn't the one who walked on water.
These pictures were of marble representations of the feet that walked on water, the feet that were washed with tears and perfume, the feet that were rough and calloused from walking all day, the feet that first felt the cool night air in a cave in Bethlehem.
The sculpted feet bear the marks of our sin. Michelangelo did not neglect to show the wounds on my Savior's feet, the wounds that I caused. The wounds that meant that my feet could remain whole.
These were the beautiful feet that saved my life.