Grace, Food, and Food Diaries

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Acts 11:9 says, “What God has cleansed, do not call common or unclean.” (See also Acts 10:13-15) Of course, this is about so much more than food, but I believe it applies to food as well. The opposite of common is sacred. This points toward intentionality, in food and in eating. This is grace and sacredness, grace-filled eating.

The other day, I had pizza and a green smoothie for breakfast. Pizza because that’s what I felt like eating, and a green smoothie because I knew that’s what my body needed. There was no condemnation or guilt, just joy. Choosing my consequences and honoring my needs. That is grace-filled eating.

I think Michael Pollan said it well in his book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma". He said, "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." That first phrase is important. Eat food. Real food. Not just food-like substances. Simply choose to eat real food, as close to the way that God made it, as much as you can. This does not always mean raw, although some foods are delicious and digestible without cooking. Eating real food is one of the best things that you can do for your body and for your health.

Pay attention to what your body is telling you, because it will not be the same for everyone. Pay attention to whether a food makes you feel well or ill. Whether it makes you feel your best or just okay. When you've identified that, there is no condemnation for making the choices that don't make you feel well. But choosing the foods that do make you feel well is honoring your body. It's treating food as something that is not common.

Certain foods that have been identified as very commonly making people feel less than well, and these are known as “The Big Eight” of food allergens. Milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soy are the eight most common food allergens in modern times. While those foods are not inherently bad, some bodies react negatively to the food and those individuals will feel much better if they avoid the offending food. I'm not going to get into why those foods don't work for us, but I want you to be aware that those are foods that many people simply don't feel well on. And if that's you, it's okay to avoid them. In fact, avoiding those foods is honoring what your body needs.

Certain stressors can make food intolerances suddenly appear, or at least become severe enough to come to attention. Chronic illness, like Lyme disease, will often trigger gluten and dairy intolerances or other food allergies. Stress, chronic inflammation, and lack of sleep can often trigger an allergy or make it worse.

Our bodies are incredibly complex and amazingly engineered. Gut health is intricately linked to brain health, and indeed to the health of the entire body and soul. We actually have more neurons inside our guts than inside our skulls. Which kind of blows my mind.

But it helps us make sense of how the foods that we eat affect the way that our brains function. When I was a child, my mom would not allow us to have Kool-Aid or anything with food coloring, because she realized that we would become so hyper that she couldn't control us. But when she cut out the Kool-Aid, and other foods and drinks with food coloring, we wouldn't be hyper. I had, and to some extent still do, a gluten intolerance from Lyme disease. I used to become quite grumpy when I accidentally got any food containing wheat or gluten. What we put in our stomachs affects the way that our brains work.

The gut neurons are responsible for producing a large percentage of serotonin and other neurotransmitters that affect mood and brain function. There is a direct connection between gut health and brain function, between the foods we eat and the emotions we feel. It may take some extended times of observation and connecting the dots to find out what works best for you. But if you choose to put in the effort, it will pay off.

You can find a food diary form here. Feel free to download and print for your personal use.

An Update on COVID

The actual risk of getting COVID-19 is probably higher now than it's ever been. Thankfully, the irrational fear seems to be abating.

In light of this, here is a protocol that has been used with good success by many of my friends. The story is that it comes from a doctor in New York.

50,000 IU of Vitamin D3, up to 4 times a day, for 5 days ONLY. Its recommended to take this with food and good fats, like butter.

1/2 lemon juiced in a cup of water morning and evening with 1 tsp Himalayan salt.

100 mcg Vitamin K2 a day. I really like this one.

200 mg magnesium citrate a day. (Or to bowel tolerance, which may be higher.)

100 to 500 mg of Vitamin C 4 times a day.

15- 30 mg of zinc a day.

Moist heat applied to the chest, breathing in a steam tent, saline nebulizer, hot soaks, and hot showers are all recommended, but be aware of the risk of fainting and weakness with soaks and showers and have someone nearby.

To loosen up the phlegm in the lungs, lie face down for at least fifteen minutes, several times a day. Have someone run a massager over your upper and mid back for 10 to 15 minutes, or pound with cupped hands.

50 to 100 mg of aspirin daily is showing some promise in studies. Apparently, the blood becomes hypercoagulable (sticky), and the aspirin is an over the counter blood thinner. Don't use if pregnant. And as a fellow nurse pointed out, be aware of the potential for stroke with the hypercoagulation, and if you see signs, treat it like the emergency that it is. (Face, Arms, Speech, Time)

Oregano oil capsules, taken with food, are a potent immune booster. Ginger foot soaks, and Unkers salve on the feet, help with circulation and improves breathing. See the instructions here: https://tinajewelscreations.blogspot.com/…/how-to-do-hot-fo…

After the first five days, many report that 10-15,000 IU of Vitamin D3, 100 mcg of K2, Vitamin C to bowel tolerance, zinc, and extra salt, has been helpful for quicker recovery and better energy.

Book Review: Broken Roads

I never did like the man. I still don’t.

Eventually, though, I grew to respect him. And because I do, here is a book review, which is something I rarely do.

I grew up steeped in the writings of the elder Wagler, David.  Family Life and Young Companion, especially. My parents approved of this, in part because I always did better with learning good behavior from books than from parental scoldings.

Through Deep Waters is a simple hardback book, no longer in print. As a youngster, I read and reread this book, trying to understand the simple faith and deep pain of this Amish patriarch as he walked through a son’s near fatal and crippling accident, and the aftermath.

I left home in 2011, bound for nursing school, and still a devout Old Order Mennonite. (Interestingly, this was the same year that David’s son Ira published a book that took the Amish-related-book world by storm). Through the next years I gulped up every book and article I could find about the Old Orders, both Amish and Mennonite, driven to understand my heritage and find my place in it. Somewhere along the way, that included a book called, simply enough, Growing up Amish. The writer, Ira, was the son of the venerable David Wagler, and he inherited his father’s talent.

(Ira shows up in his father’s book, of course, but I didn’t really notice. He was just one of a string of other sons, sons whom the father mentioned only in passing.)

Growing up Amish, as I saw it, was a powerful, dangerous book, the keen words of a talented and bitter man. My younger brother, sensitive and seeking, read it too, and I wished he wouldn’t. I was afraid the bitterness would taint him, and I didn’t want that.

For some reason, I kept my copy, despite those deep reservations. It sat on my shelf, for a few years, one of those books that I didn’t lend out because I couldn’t endorse it’s message.

Meanwhile, my seeking for something of significance took me through some harsh, dark days. I lost myself in intellectualism and quietly rebelled, discovering that cell phones and mp3 players were easily hidden behind my obedient façade. Eventually, the hypocrisy and guilt caught up with me. I nearly threw off the Old Order life and ran away to the city, but in a series of events that I can only call grace, I changed my mind and stayed. Pitched all my forbidden electronics. Put my whole heart into being a good little Mennonite girl who was doing the unheard of thing of going to college.

It was then, in that period of my life, that I signed up for a sociology class about the Amish, and Ira Wagler’s book was assigned as a textbook. I read Growing up Amish again, and discussed it in class, trying to hide my distaste. And to my surprise, the book wasn’t as bitter as I remembered. In fact, I could identify with some of the pain, more than I wanted to admit. At the end of the semester, the book went back on my shelf, studded with sticky notes and underlining.

A few months later, like Ira, I knew that I could leave, and I did. It was hell, learning to walk free, but I’ve never truly wanted to go back. I met Ira in person, sometime shortly after leaving the Old Order, and he graciously gave his time and attention as we chatted. In that brief meeting, I took an intense dislike to him as a person, for reasons that probably had more to do with my hangups than his. But I kept reading his blogs and was grudgingly impressed. Enough to preorder the next book, when the announcement came.

Last week, Broken Roads showed up in my mailbox. I read it in two days, gulping down chapters in between the hours of work and socializing. I stayed up late, I read in the bathtub and while waiting for water to boil.

I found myself wiping tears, a few times. The pain of broken roads, the longing to connect with one’s father, and to make him proud. Excelling in college, scooping up full-ride scholarships, ignoring advisor’s advice about which school to transfer to, choosing an unconventional path by any and all standards; I did all those too. The gospel shows up clear in this book, not hidden and half ashamed like in the first one. I respect that, a lot.

And the bitterness that spoiled the first book? It rarely shows its head here. Instead, there is a quiet resignation and honesty and authentic forgiveness that won my respect.

I still don’t like Ira. But I respect him now. And I recommend this book, Broken Roads.

This one, I can recommend. This one, there is no doubt about whether it can stay on my overcrowded shelves.

Both books are on Amazon. Growing up Amish , and Broken Roads.

Note: These are affiliate links, which means I get a few cents if you click through to purchase and your price stays the same.

Photo from Unsplash

In Which I Talk About Money

I’m not quite sure how this happened… but grace and redemption are, for sure, part of the story.

My dad is a financial genius. He is a dedicated dairy farmer, so it’s not like he’s got a lucrative profession. But somehow, through thirty-plus years, there was always enough, even for the unrelenting medical bills (all but one of the family got chronic Lyme disease over a period of fifteen years, a grueling and expensive experience).

Unusual for that time and place, my parents openly discussed finances around us kids. We knew the kind of work and thought it took to manage a business with razor thin margins and high operating costs and absorbed many basic money principles just by overhearing discussions with accountants, consultants, and bankers.

Given that kind of foundation, you would think that “money stuff” would come easy for me. And for quite a few years, it seemed that it did. I had ten thousand in the bank when I enrolled in college, and I worked crazy hours all the way through to offset expenses as much as possible.  I collected impressive amounts of scholarship money, and graduated debt free. I thought, smugly, that my peers just didn’t have it quite as together. I felt sorry for them, without the advantages of a good solid Mennonite upbringing.

But then. I hit rock bottom, and in desperation, admitted that I couldn’t handle the emotional pain I’d been living with for decades.

Life fell apart. In the process of finally addressing unresolved trauma and abuse, I lost family relationships, friends, church, community, and my debt-free status.

It’s now over three years since the fateful day when I began to allow God to do the undoing and healing process. And of the many things I’ve learned in that time, perhaps the most unexpected has to do with finances.

My dad is a financial genius. The things he does, are intuitive. He loves to run his business account with cushion of a hundred dollars or less, but somehow he calculates so well that the debit card is never declined. And while he taught us kids a lot more than average, you can’t teach things that you can’t explain. It’s taken me a long time to understand some of what he was doing when he scribbled out an intricate and perfectly balanced budget on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

He taught me so much, and it’s been invaluable. One of the griefs that been hardest to grapple with, was realizing that he didn’t teach me enough. But one day, I stopped deluding myself, and looked the facts squarely in the face.

I had credit cards and had run a cumulative balance in the thousands for several years. Thanks to zero interest introductory offers, and low-cost balance transfers, it wasn’t costing me much. But the balance had stayed pretty much the same for months, and it seemed that I couldn’t make headway.

I finally admitted that I had a problem, and cautiously confessed these facts to a few trusted friends. Then I got serious about getting out of debt. Dave Ramsey’s videos, including the “Baby Steps” plan, filled in a few crucial pieces of practical knowledge that had been missing. I actually have a working budget, for the first time in my life. And the debt began to decrease. A hundred here, and five hundred there. Another balance transfer to keep from incurring interest.

Finally, I was down to the final thousand. Then the power steering went out on my car. The repair meant replacing the entire steering column and took out my emergency fund. The day after I put the car in the shop, the shutdown hit. My income abruptly dropped by more than half, with no emergency fund.

What happened next is sheer grace. A few days working in a farm store. A housecleaning job there. Babysitting. And generous, astounding, utterly unexpected financial gifts. A new client that is in all ways better than the ones I lost.

Two and half months later, and six weeks behind my carefully plotted schedule, that last thousand has been paid. My cumulative credit limit increased by approximately $1,500 (even during the pandemic skittishness), and my credit score topped 800 for the first time ever.

I’m less confident in my own abilities than perhaps I’ve ever been, and better equipped. And that, too, is grace.

Postscript: If you’d rather a book, one of the better known of Dave Ramsey’s books is The Total Money Makeover. (That is an affiliate link: If you use it, I get a few cents, and the cost to you stays the same.)