One of my favorite ways to cook vegetables, especially fresh summer vegetables, is to roast them.  Cut in similar sized chunks squash, zucchini, sweet peppers, onions, eggplant, and anything else that suits you, carrots, fennel, and leeks maybe, sprinkle with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and roast on a baking sheet at 425 degrees for 30-45 minutes, depending upon your oven and the size chunks you cut.  About halfway through, throw in sprigs of fresh marjoram, oregano, rosemary, and thyme, and some minced garlic.  Stir every 15 minutes.  Yummy!

Without water to dilute the flavor, and with high direct heat to caramelize the outsides, the natural flavor of each vegetable concentrates and sweetens.  Dieticians can probably tell you the scientific processes that cause the sugars to creep to the surface and brown, but I don’t need a dietician to tell me this is the best way to eat fresh vegetables.  And every summer when the garden is producing more than we can possibly keep up with, it is also the healthiest.

A few years ago, a good brother teaching 1 Peter 1: 6,7, if need be you have been put to grief by many trials, that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold that perishes, though it is proved by fire…, said that when Christians are tried by fire they are “purifried.”  I think that was a slip of the tongue, but his accidentally coined word has stuck with me ever since. 

I used to pray for God to keep my children from trials in their lives, but I got to thinking one day about some of the things we have been through.  I bet you have a similar list, things so traumatic at the time you can even put a date on them—September 2, 1988, March 16, 1996, February 22, 2002, February 8, 2005.  And that doesn’t count the lesser ones—November 1981, June 1984, and so on.  Do you know what?  We made it through all of them, and we are not the same people today that we would have been if we had never experienced them.

So, to our three precious children, I no longer pray that God will spare you from trials.  But I do pray that your faith will be strengthened to see them through, that you will grow as servants of the Lord, and that your wisdom will increase with each experience.  As your Mom, I can’t help but add, though, “Please, Lord, don’t make them too hard.” 

This is the only way to account for passages such as James wrote in 1:2-4, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into many trials; knowing that the proving of your faith works patience, and let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing.  Those people understood the value of pain.  We all want to lose weight without dieting, slim down and tone up without exercising, grow knowledgeable with studying, but it just won’t happen.  Nor will growth in faith occur without experiencing some difficulties in life. 

How many clichés do we have about this?  “No pain, no gain.” “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  They are clichés for a reason:  they are true.  All I have to do is look at my garden and my flower beds.  All those carefully tended, watered, and fed plants will die when the drought comes.  Those tough old weeds will grow regardless. 

As to my roasted vegetables, cooking them under high heat sweetens them.  I need to pray that the roasting I undergo will “purifry” me as well.

Wherein you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been put to grief in manifold trials; that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold that perishes, though it is proved by fire, may be found unto praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; whom not having seen you love, on whom though now you see him not, yet believing, you rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full of glory; receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls. 1 Pet 1:6-9

Dene Ward

May I just make a small observation from years of experience on both sides of the equation?  When you are suffering, when you are broken-hearted, when you are in pain and anguish or full of fear, someone who loves you will inevitably make an insensitive comment, a tactless comment, a mind-numbingly stupid comment.  Do you think they do it because they don’t love you any more?  No, just the opposite—they do it because they hate to see you in such pain, because they want more than anything to comfort you, and in that love and zeal they don’t know what to say, so the wrong thing pops out.

I can make you a list of things NOT to say in various circumstances.  Why?  Because I have had them said to me in an assortment of painful circumstances in the past several decades.  You are not the only one who has been left with a hanging jaw and a shaking head.  And second, I can make that list because I have said a few myself.  I have friends who have miscarried, who have lost spouses early, who have lost children to accident or disease, whose marriage has fallen apart, who have been the one to discover a mate’s suicide, who have suffered the pain of a horrible disease and its ultimate end, and probably every time I have said something I wished I hadn’t.  I try to remember those times when someone says something similar to me—they love me as much as I loved my friends or they would never have tried.  They would have simply walked away.

And so I will never make one of those lists that regularly make the rounds—“What Not to Say When…”  In fact, I am getting a little fed up with them.  Those lists seem to imply that the person hearing those words has never said anything dumb themselves, that they would automatically do better.  Pardon my skepticism.  I have known some wise people in my many years, but none of them has ever managed to be perfect in their choice of words every time.  I doubt that anyone in their twenties or thirties or even forties has either.  Should we be willing to learn better?  Yes.  But most of what I have heard has come in a scathing, sarcastic tone meant more to lash out than help someone else learn.

God expects me to act like a Christian no matter what I am going through.  Did Jesus bark at His disciples the night before His death, a death He knew would be so horrible that He “sweat drops as blood”?  Did He browbeat the women weeping before the cross while He hung there in agony?  If anyone could have been excused for snapping back, it would have been Him, but the example He left was one of grace under pressure. 

As His disciple I must still be longsuffering, no matter what I am going through.  I must “forbear in love.”  I must “bear all things, believe all things, and hope all things.”  Certainly I must be willing to say, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” if the thing they do comes out of a heart full of love.  It is difficult when, as the Psalmist said, My days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is struck down like grass and has withered; I forget to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my flesh. I am like a desert owl of the wilderness, like an owl of the waste places; I lie awake; I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop, (102:3-7).  I have been there.  On those days, it is difficult to put up with other people’s blunders.  It is, in fact, difficult to deal with people at all.  I am ashamed of my failures and so grateful to my caring friends and family who still showed me their love, even when I didn’t show mine and probably made them wonder why they kept bothering to try.  But I am not going to excuse myself because of my despair by attacking them with a scornful list of their failures.

God does not put in an exception clause for when we are hurting.  Like His Son, we must still exercise self-control and love, graciously accepting the comfort that those who care sometimes ham-handedly give.  Even afflictions that have nothing to do with suffering for His name can test us as much as persecution can, just in how we handle them.  Isn’t that, in fact, the real test?  Pain is never an excuse for sin.

For hereunto were you called: because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow his steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered threatened not; but committed himself to him that judges righteously: 1 Peter 2:21-23.

Dene Ward