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Dry chicken and undercooked potatoes were the cons

Dry chicken and undercooked potatoes were the consistent theme of most of the meals I cooked in our early days of marriage. We lived in a tiny one bedroom apartment with a kitchen the size of a small walk in closet and packed our 4ftx4ft bistro table with as many chairs as we possibly could. On my best days, our meals were dull. On the worst, they bordered on peculiar.
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I didn’t particularly like cooking, but I loved people so I kept on making meals and opening our door and sitting for hours around that little table—listening to stories and sharing hope. This is the thing about a home cooked meal, it brings people together and invites them to linger. My growing love for the art of cooking started there, not because the meal has to be great, but because every investment of care and preparation in a meal is an act of love.
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Over the years I have found the sound of oil snapping and popping on the stove a deep comfort and gotten giddy over the mingling of spices and herbs as their aroma fills the air. I’ve taken a lot of joy in carefully constructing menus and nothing beats the delight of watching my friends finding satisfaction and rest around our dining table.
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My kids have started to share those passions with me so I began collecting some of our favorite recipes in this book to pass along to them when they are in need of help in the days ahead. While I love witnessing their faces as they learn to measure and pour and sift and chop, my heart yearns for them to not only grow a love for cooking but a love for people. On the first page of our family collection is this prayer from Every Moment Holy, a reminder to me that cooking is a labor of love first and an art second:

“As we perform the various tasks of washing, chopping, sifting, mixing, simiring, baking, and boiling, let those little acts coalesce into an embodied liturgy of service--an outworking of love offered for your purposes, that through us, your tender care might be translated into the comforting and cheery language of nurturing food and drink offered for the benefit of others... (continued int the comments) #exhalecreativity #everymomentholy

A prayer for my church from the words of John Pipe

A prayer for my church from the words of John Piper and a pic of some of the cuties from @kxchurchoc:
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“Oh Lord, by the truth of your Word, and the power of your Spirit and the ministry of your body, build men and women at [ @kxchurchoc ]...
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Who don’t love the world more than God...who don’t expect that life should be comfortable and easy...who don’t get paralyzed by other’s disapproval, who don’t return evil for evil, who don’t hold grudges, who don’t gossip, who don’t twist the truth, who don’t brag or boast...
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But who are ablaze for God, who are utterly God-besotted, who are filled with the Holy Spirit, who strive to know the height and depth of Christ’s love, who are crucified to the world and dead to sin, who are purified by the Word and addicted to righteousness, who are mighty in memorizing and using the Scriptures, who keep the Lord’s Day holy and refreshing, who are broken by the consciousness of sin, who are thrilled by the wonder of free grace, who are stunned into humble silence by the riches of God’s glory, who are persevering constantly in prayer, who are ruthless in self-denial, who are fearless in public witness to Christ’s lordship, who are able to unmask error and blow away doctrinal haze...who are content with what they have and trusting the promises of God, who are patient and kind and meek when life is hard.”
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And a few other prayers of my own:
May you, Lord, build a people who are intellectually hospitable, radically generous with their resources, passionately welcoming of the outsider, who are able to endure hardship with unwavering faith, who are more captivated by the person across the table than they are in their own reflection, who dispense grace quickly, who have eternity so encompass their thoughts that it would drive their every motivation and permeate every private, unobservable moment, who’s internal devotion would far eclipse their external worship.
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He is faithful to do all these things @kxchurchoc fam. May this bring you as much hope as it has me today.

A big day for Geneva Mae. We got all dressed up an

A big day for Geneva Mae. We got all dressed up and took her out to get her ears pierced and now she looks so grown up and I just can’t stand how fast this is all going and I have definitely shed a few tears every time I catch a glimpse of her. 😭😍💛

334 days ago, on a gloomy Thursday afternoon in Ma

334 days ago, on a gloomy Thursday afternoon in March of last year, Chris got a phone call that would change everything for our small church plant. The school we rented space from was closing its doors for the next two weeks to slow the spread of the Coronavirus. Our first thought: "two weeks is such a long time to be separated as a church." Our team scrambled like crazy for the next 48 hours to find the best solution and we found ourselves with an option none of us felt excited about: online church. What was supposed to be two weeks turned out to be an indefinite season of homelessness for King's Cross.
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For the last 334 days we endured countless awkward zoom calls, distanced social gatherings (mixed with friends who disliked masks and longed for a hug and others who had to muster up all the courage in the world just to show up). We began gathering biweekly in a friend's backyard for church, enduring temperatures in the 100s before 10am and at times so cold that our toes went numb. We've broken bread in the rain just so we could be together and found a million creative ways to maintain connection with one another. But I won't lie, it has been so painful.
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If I knew that those two weeks would turn into 334 days of homelessness for our church, I would have been crushed. But the Lord, in his kindness, only allowed us to see what was right before us and in the meantime was weaving together something more beautiful than we ever could have imagined. In this past year our compulsion to be consumeristic with church was put to the test as our gatherings were stripped down and we gathered simply to worship and nothing more. Our temptation to keep people at arms length was drawn out, close to its furthest conclusion, and reveled how vitally important it is to have people in your life. The value of communion and the preciousness of gathering and singing out alongside each other were highlighted when it was taken away from us. This year only proved to strengthen our church and prove how valuable it is to have a people to belong to.
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Last night our 334 days of homelessness came to an end. We have a home and we are so excited to see what’s next! Love you @kxchurchoc fam!

These days we have been on a relentless search to

These days we have been on a relentless search to discover what is good right before our eyes.
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If I'm being honest, this has never come naturally to me. I have always had an acute awareness for what is broken or lacking in the world and myself. This disposition fit well into my Christian faith early on. I began to discover that because of the fall, things really were broken all along, far more than I was ever aware of. Left to my own devices though, my vision could easily be plagued by pervasive pessimism.
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I think about this a lot, especially as I scroll through social media and engage in conversations about the world around us. Pessimism seems to be plaguing our days. The thing about it is, it subtly begins to color everything.
▪️It affects the way we view our friends. Is our natural disposition to identify how they could be better or impulsively celebrate evidence of God's grace in their life?
▪️It affects the way we view our circumstances. Is our natural bent to feel as if our unique set of vocational challenges, family dynamics, financial limitations, unmet desires too hard for others to identify with? Or do we allow those things to draw us to the Lord and shape our empathy toward others?
▪️Pessimism can affect the way we engage with people unlike ourselves. Are we inclined to be skeptical, or do we give people the benefit of the doubt?
▪️Do we comb through the headlines and fret over the widespread effects of sin, or do we search for evidence of God's good work in the world?
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While Christians surely are heralders of truth, unafraid to acknowledge the dark, we are surely also the only ones fixed to shine a light in it. The truth we proclaim is one of hope, not of despair.
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Maybe you’re spending your days fighting crime or changing diapers or teaching bored high schoolers. Regardless, Paul’s correction to the Philippian church has been ringing in my ears and I think it’s a good exhortation for us all: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Phillipans 4:8). #everymomentholy

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Homegoing is the online home of Alyssa Poblete, a writer in Southern California.

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