All by Margie Haack

Americans have moved so far away from the process of butchering and a lot of us have sworn off eating meat due to health reasons, or for the sake of morality, that we can’t bear to trap the mice living in the couch or the spider making a web behind the toilet. Most of us are removed so far from the family farm and rural life that we have lost even secondhand experience of the cost of blood and butchering. If we buy meat at all, it is sealed in plastic and perched on a white tray with a diaper underneath to absorb offensive liquid.
That is what I crave, I’m hungry to understand my purpose, to believe that human finiteness is okay, and to know and believe when God made us to live in dailyness He said, “It is good.” I’d like to live with a certain clarity that though the day inevitably comes with suffering, it’s still good, and I would like to gratefully receive that day with all its shuffling and waiting as a gift.
More often these days I make an effort to contemplate, to participate in what comes to life in the kitchen. Scratch cooking and baking is somewhat counter-cultural and partly a spiritual exercise for me. It's my effort to deny fastness in order to slow down, appreciate, and taste the unfolding richness of what God has implanted in ordinary ingredients.