Salad Bowl Philosophy

First of all, I must credit a friend for naming this concept although the idea may well be a familiar one to most of us.

Generally, speaking, the ingredients in a salad are considered to be very nutritious whether it be a vegetable salad or a fruit salad (I won’t be discussing the elements of jello salada at this point). However, as we eat each bite of one of these nutritious salads, we do not particularly consider each leaf of lettuce or spinach or each chunk of tomato or cucumber.

So it is with many of our beliefs. In the cases that come to mind are such concepts as Heaven about which our pastor preached last week. I won’t belabor any points since his excellent sermon can be heard on our www/calvaryelko.org website. Suffice it to say that it brought many comments from mature Christian friends who said that they had never heard heaven explained that way before. It was one such conversation that my friend said  heaven was one of those beliefs she just tossed in the salad bowl. In other words, she believed it because the Bible taught it, but she didn’t understand it.

Randy Alcorn has written a fictional trilogy about some men and their experiences with heaven: Deception, Dominion, and Deadline (not in that order). Very interesting views of what we will be doing in heave, and for those who might gag at the thought of eternally playing harps, he (and Pastor Sam) bring up other options.

Back to the salad bowl idea.  I have been reading a Beth Moore book entitled “Believing God.” This blog is getting too long to go where I’m heading, so I guess the next blog will be a continuation. For right now the thought I’m focusing on is that the more we study God’s Word, the more we can take a belief out of our “salad bowl” and understand truths which were previously just accepted.

I would love to dialog with any readers about what I've written.

An Anniversary—of Sorts

This is the blog post I intended to write last week but ran out of motivation. Four years ago on March 1, I suffered my first broken bone. I was making last minute preparations for hosting a Bible Study at my house and decided my tablecloth needed to be shaken. I headed for the back door, stepped out on the concrete step..the next thing I knew, I was sitting on icy concrete with a most excruciating pain in my ankle. Almost as bad as the pain was the memory of the internal crack I had heard as I fell.

I painfully inched my way backwards through the door. Fortunately, it had not shut.( I just now thought of that and shudder to think of how I might have frozen out on my own back doorstep until Dean finally realized I was missing. That would have been hypothermia piled upon shock!)

Dean finally heard my feeble yelps from the laundry room and I convinced him to call the ambulance as it hurt too much to hobble to the car. Once the EMTs arrived and got my leg stabilized, the pain stopped. Of course, I have a feeling that the prayers of my Bible Study group had a bearing on that.

The leg was x-rayed and casted at the ER and I saw the orthopedic surgeon at the end of the week.  After looking at the x-ray, her verdict was a spiral fracture. That meant surgery with a plate and screws holding the bone in place and no weight bearing on that ankle for six weeks. I can definitely state that anesthesia is a great thing and having it wear off is not so wonderful. That was one nasty pain. No doubt my friends who have had knee replacements would call me a wimp, but each to his own pain level!

I was not yet retired so I learned how to use a variety of  wheeled aids to get around: office chair, walker, and wheel chair. Heading for the restroom at the office was an interesting procedure. I would “scoot” my desk chair to the office door, retrieve my walker, hop to the wheelchair, climb in, fold up the walker on my lap and wheel myself down the hall. Then unfold the walker, get out of the chair, etc. 

Since I am the main cook in the household, we got to eat lots of fast food until my balance was good enough to move around the kitchen easily.  It’s surprising how difficult it is to move pans off burners, open oven doors and put in baking dishes, all while balancing on one leg.  It can actually be a challenge to chop an onion on a cutting board.

At the end of six weeks, the long screw was removed from the fracture so I could begin putting weight on that ankle. I opted to have it done with a local anesthetic. Not a good idea, particularly since an emergency occurred at the doctor’s office where the procedure was being done and the Lydocaine wore off before she could finish. The second shot wasn’t pleasant  and getting sewn up was DEFINTELY the worst part. I wish I could find that long screw—it was really impressive—I would say two inches in length, but of course, things like that grow in your memory--sort of like the fish that got away..  

 

The remaining hardware I carried around in my ankle are pictured here and were removed a year later. The doctor suggested I might want to make a wind chime out of the plate and screws but I haven’t yet managed to get that written  on Dean’s honey-do list.

I hope not to repeat any bone-breaking activities, but the healing of an “old bone” like mine is a very real testimony of the healing power God has built into our bodies. A friend and I were discussing how we take the normal function of our body parts so for granted—until we break an ankle or wrist, or need a knee or shoulder replaced.

One thing about it: if you like to shop, breaking a leg will help curb that desire quickly.L