Hot peppery muesli-granola!
This past Christmas season I made some granola from scratch, both to have for ourselves and to package up as small gifts. Pouring honey and chopping almonds, my thoughts returned to our first many years of living in Bolivia, when I’d made granola every week, as the only breakfast cereal my family ever ate. That’s because, in our rural area of Bolivia, there was not one packaged breakfast cereal of any kind available to buy in a store.
It didn’t bother me. I pretty much reveled in my abundant opportunities to cook and bake from scratch during those years, partly because I knew it was healthier for my family, partly because I appreciated being able to have a part-time house helper which, to have then, was part of the culture there, reasonable in cost, then, and a GREAT way to help a woman have a great job in the context, there and then.
To be honest, deep in my heart, having a helper there each day to wash the dishes I messed up cooking or do a bit of cleaning always made me feel spoiled and like a queen of my castle, albeit a castle with rough cement floors and an undyed muslin, chicken-wire and straw ceiling, on which the rats scurried at night!
Back to making granola. My first efforts turned out disastrous, though the recipe was simple! My kids wouldn’t eat the stuff. Neither would Paul! I grabbed a spoon and taste-tested it. VERY HOT-PEPPERY!
Hot-peppery breakfast muesli – WOW! No wonder my poor family didn’t want to eat it! What was going on? I was obviously missing something, somewhere.
A little easy sleuthing quickly turned up the answer to my homemade cereal’s sinus-clearing, eye-streaming flavor. The oat flakes I would buy in the open outdoor farmer’s market nearby, from an open “quintal” (or one hundred-pound burlap sack) had been ground at the local grain mill. And the local grain mill had huge grinding stones that ALSO ground all the villagers for a hundred miles’ dried chili peppers, red and yellow, which were THE food staple of the region.
This discovery, and all these years later, makes me think of the “DIFFERENTNESS” of every little thing, when one moves to a foreign culture.
When Christ came to this dark, violent, sorry and confused world of humanity, did he just exchange his scenery? No, he became one of us – he “incarnated”, as a human being, yet without losing his “God-ness”, his God-message.
We might think on these matters, and aspire to “incarnate” to a more significant extent in our host countries and cultures, really living among the people and sharing their daily lives with them, walking in their shoes, respecting them, loving them. How? Well, aside from the obvious ways, there is also prioritizing attitudes, just – attitudes of respect, of humility, of not being in a hurry, of being willing to listen, of carrying oneself as a learner. Often, I fail badly at this. We can’t even begin to do this aside from being one hundred percent in God’s grace, letting it imbue us. And even then, we’ll mess up, and be so bad at incarnating God’s love. The wonderful thing is, He wants to use us anyways, and will. And people are (very often) incredibly gracious and forgiving, of our mess ups.
When we go, let’s not be surprised or offended by the “hot-peppery granola”. Let’s ask our God to help us meet a challenge, and then the next, and onwards to many others, with his own grace and humility, and let’s live with the people, deeply sharing life with them and learning so many wonderful lessons from them and from the HONOR and PRIVILEGE of being a guest in their country and culture.
Hot peppery muesli-granola!
This past Christmas season I made some granola from scratch, both to have for ourselves and to package up as small gifts. Pouring honey and chopping almonds, my thoughts returned to our first many years of living in Bolivia, when I’d made granola every week, as the only breakfast cereal my family ever ate. That’s because, in our rural area of Bolivia, there was not one packaged breakfast cereal of any kind available to buy in a store.
It didn’t bother me. I pretty much reveled in my abundant opportunities to cook and bake from scratch during those years, partly because I knew it was healthier for my family, partly because I appreciated being able to have a part-time house helper which, to have then, was part of the culture there, reasonable in cost, then, and a GREAT way to help a woman have a great job in the context, there and then.
To be honest, deep in my heart, having a helper there each day to wash the dishes I messed up cooking or do a bit of cleaning always made me feel spoiled and like a queen of my castle, albeit a castle with rough cement floors and an undyed muslin, chicken-wire and straw ceiling, on which the rats scurried at night!
Back to making granola. My first efforts turned out disastrous, though the recipe was simple! My kids wouldn’t eat the stuff. Neither would Paul! I grabbed a spoon and taste-tested it. VERY HOT-PEPPERY!
Hot-peppery breakfast muesli – WOW! No wonder my poor family didn’t want to eat it! What was going on? I was obviously missing something, somewhere.
A little easy sleuthing quickly turned up the answer to my homemade cereal’s sinus-clearing, eye-streaming flavor. The oat flakes I would buy in the open outdoor farmer’s market nearby, from an open “quintal” (or one hundred-pound burlap sack) had been ground at the local grain mill. And the local grain mill had huge grinding stones that ALSO ground all the villagers for a hundred miles’ dried chili peppers, red and yellow, which were THE food staple of the region.
This discovery, and all these years later, makes me think of the “DIFFERENTNESS” of every little thing, when one moves to a foreign culture. You can’t just move overseas and expect that only your scenery is going to change. Your expectations need to totally and deeply be changed to a whole other set of expectation – which is that you’re not going to know WHAT to expect, on almost every level. You have to be okay with THAT.
When Christ came to this dark, violent, sorry and confused world of humanity, did he just exchange his scenery? No, he became one of us – he “incarnated”, as a human being, yet without losing his “God-ness”, his God-message.
We modern-day want-to-be messengers would do well to think more deeply on these matters, and to “incarnate” to a more significant extent in our host countries and cultures, really living among the people and sharing their daily lives with them, walking in their shoes, respecting them, loving them. How? Well, aside from the obvious ways, there is also prioritizing a really high standard of language learning, and culture acquisition for oneself. Not being content with plateau-ing, LOW, if truth be known, on Spanish (and Quechua, Guarani, or Aymara) language fluency. And, there are many other ways as well, some of them almost intangibles, or, attitudes, just – attitudes of respect, of humility, of not being in a hurry, of being willing to listen, of carrying oneself as a learner.
When we go, let’s not be surprised or offended by the “hot-peppery granola”. Let’s ask our God to help us meet the challenge, and many, MANY others, with his own grace and humility, and let’s live in with the people, deeply sharing life with them and learning so many wonderful life lessons from them and from the HONOR and PRIVILEGE of being a guest in their culture and an ambassador of the Savior.
As you go forward in your life..
“As you go forward in your life, become SO CLEAR AS TO WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT that you never again do what I did and make the mistake of going for what you only THINK you want. ” – Victoria Moran
GlobeRoamer 