TJ Hirst

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

A serving of ice cream is only ½ cup. I’m not sure I wanted to read that on nutrition facts for my favorite flavor, mint chocolate chip. The good news—a serving of ice cream is only 150 calories, which is less than expected. The bad news—I have to keep it to the true serving size, not just fill up my bowl.

Facts like these are readily available to anyone who can read. Yet, why did I not know this? Is is that I really don’t want to know so that I won’t be responsible for what I choose? Reading nutrition facts and food labels for the June Reading Challenge alerted me to my more-than-occasional indifference to food facts.

To remedy that mindset in me, here’s my second step of my challenge to be more aware of serving size and nutritional value:

Write down everything I eat for one week.

Reading and writing go together in my thought process. I read. I think. I write. I plan. I apply. I change. Each is an important step in my process to develop better habits, including my eating habits.

Are you trying it with me? What have you learned about reading food labels? Leave a comment below.

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

The start of summer signals the season of going places. Summer vacations, summer lessons and summer activities stir our sense of adventure beyond the routine. The adventures that start with summer weddings, summer moves and summer graduations promise new opportunities when we reach our destination.

I adore the discovery of new paths leading to unexplored places. Going anywhere opens my eyes. Going somewhere changes my vision. Except, I am not going anywhere right now. I am not moving or vacationing or starting anything new, even though everyone around me seems to be.

My close friend, on the other hand, is moving across the country. She lived more than 80 miles from me here in Minnesota, but we connected despite the distance. My children and I drove to her home and spent several hours cleaning with her on moving day. Another friend was there who commented that it surprised her that I would “drive so far just to clean a bathroom and clean out a fridge.”

I told her I would go anywhere to help, but I would especially do that for this friend. She and I grew close over the years of an important responsibility we shared, but more than that, our hearts connected one-to-one.

Last year that responsibility ended, and she went on in that place without me. The purpose and passion we shared became just hers. My state of rest, though needed, left my vision and goals without momentum to move forward or a desire to look back. My communication circles shrunk. Loss and loneliness filled my place while she and others continued going. For them, nothing had changed. For me, everything had.

I wish I could say that it eventually was the same again for me and between us. Yet, while shared places bring shared experiences, ultimately, different places bring different experiences. This week, though, we sat together in her empty house, remembering—and feeling—that friendship that still binds us.

As I passed her loaded moving van on my way out, my thoughts did not linger longingly or enviously upon the adventures ahead of her. Ironically, stopping in my own place took me to the place I wanted to go. That inaction, over time, refined me to see every day of the glorious world right around me.

This is an entry in the June Write-Away Contest at Scribbit.

Discovery filled my twenties. The process of looking for and trying new recipes, new decor and design, new parenting advice, new clothing trends and new beauty tips filled me with new ideas and eagerness. Toward the end of that decade, the new needed to fade so I could concentrate on following through on all I had introduced.

Doing filled the first phase of my thirties. Not reading parenting books with baby number three left me time to parent. We actually built our “dream home” from my design file and threw away any goals for perfection in the process. I quit clipping recipes and started creating my own with what I had on hand. As the end of this decade draws closer, I wonder about the next.

Will I return to discovery? I love learning and applying it, but I am too old to just follow a trend for a trend’s sake. I inch toward this new season, eager to not just regress and redo, but to discover at a deeper level, adding carefully to what I’ve chosen. And I stand in my well-equipped kitchen considering how to combine experience and enthusiasm into the mixture that will follow.

Ham Salad Puff
Taste of Home Cookbook

1 cup water
½ cup butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1-1½ cups fully cooked ham
2 celery ribs, chopped
½ cup chopped green pepper
½ cup sliced green onions
½ cup mayonnaise
1 teaspoon dill weed
lettuce leaves

1. In a large saucepan, bring water and butter to a boil. Add flour and salt all at once, stirring until a smooth ball forms. Remove from heat; let stand 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Continue beating until mixture is smooth and shiny.

2. Spread dough onto the bottom and up the sides of a greased 9-inch pie plate. Bake at 400° for 30-35 minutes or until puffed and golden brown. Prick the puff with a fork. Cool on a wire rack.

3. In a bowl, combine the ham, celery, green peppers, onions, mayonnaise, dill. Line puff with lettuce; fill with ham mixture. Yield: 4-6 servings.

In the middle of my perennial garden bed, I sat between the weeds and the flowers, not knowing the difference. Sometimes perennials or wildflowers that aren’t in bloom can look a lot like weeds. I was a young mom and a young gardener inheriting a garden from previous owners.

Meanwhile, my neighbor across the street cleared and prepared her beds for an herb and vegetable garden. I craved turning over my own soil to plant new seeds or plants. I ripped at the plants that looked like weeds to me. Yet, as I proceeded, I felt a quiet urge to wait patiently and watch the garden, to not even pull the weeds. My nurturing instinct was louder than my impulsiveness, and I backed off the garden bed.

In that everyday gardening experience I became not only a more patient gardener but a more patient mother, working slowly and carefully in both realms.

My everyday realms are ordinary, but they are a microcosm to larger realms. Considering and connecting, comparing and contrasting everyday experiences to each other and to the larger world reveals truth. The grass is always greener somewhere else until light illuminates our own.

This is the 100^th post at tjhirst.com. In celebration, I reveal a new look and a new tagline, Illuminate Everyday. My husband, Paul, created this original web design to reflect my writing goals.

To illuminate is to provide or brighten with light, to make understandable, clarify, to enlighten. I am still seeking and finding what inspires, but the process to seek and find creative, intellectual or spiritual inspiration is not an anxious perusal of all the available resources the world over.

Inspiration comes when I illuminate the everyday people, circumstances and situations in my own realm and consider the truths that exist right around me. My writing is a creative process that “elevates the everyday rather than denigrates it,” as my husband says. My goal on this website is to share that process and what I discover.

The Question: Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us today?

I am a thief. I stole two hangers from a hotel. Paul pointed it out to me when he unpacked. Sure enough, two outfits attached to two wooden hotel hangers.

My first thought—return them immediately or my guilt will overflow each time I see them. I could mail them back to the hotel, which was in Minnesota but not in a city I would travel to soon.

I separated them from our hangers. And for seven days they stayed. (I don’t go to the post office that often.)

On the eighth day I prepared the lesson for my Old Testament class on correction, chastisement, and repentance. “And if it be stolen from him, he shall make restitution unto the owner thereof.” Exodus 22:12

Before even teaching the class, I set the hangers on the floor of our closet where we would trip on them. I asked Paul if he could return them on his business trip.

He redeemed me. They gave him a cookie. I received a clear conscious.

For all the bad hype we give to nagging feelings of guilt, I still prefer that small corrective way to the more destructive scriptural accounts of chastisements when God’s people didn’t respond to quieter means.