Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: MIX (10/22/15)
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TITLE: Essential Ingredients | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lisa Enqvist
10/29/15 -
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For several years I had tried to find a way to avoid going to India. I was a missionary kid, and had mixed feelings about following my parents’ footsteps. I hated the heat of the tropics. The pain of leaving friends behind was too familiar. Why couldn’t God choose someone else? Why couldn’t He at least wait a few years till I was more prepared?
When I surrendered to God’s call, a great wall of impossibilities stood in my way. There was no one to support me financially. I could not even apply for a visa. Yet, out of the chaos of impossibilities, the way was opened. I had arrived in India.
While working for one year with a group of volunteers, our diet was very simple. Most days we ate spiced lentils or beans with rice. We had chicken one day a week. I only know that each meal was a feast. I wish I knew all the names of the spices our cook, Laksmi, mixed on her grinding stone. Some were quite common, such as the bright red chili pepper, the brown cumin, the coriander seeds, the pale yellow ginger rhizome, the tiny black mustard seeds and the dark yellow turmeric root. Laksmi had other spices which grew in the tiny plot in front of her mud hut in her village.
When I now think of all the ingredients she mixed together, even for the simple beans and lentil curries, I realize that she was an amazing cook. We loved the food she made, and she seemed to enjoy making it.
I’ve been learning more about the essential ingredients for Indian cooking, I begin to understand God’s wisdom in creating the plants which were available to the poor village people,and through them, were also made available to us. All the spices had health benefits, apart from the appetizing qualities they gave to our food. We were healthy, in spite of the extremely hot weather, and the tough demands made on us in the needs of the sick people visiting our clinic.
God has given us the essential ingredients to live effective and productive lives even under the most unfavorable conditions. He gave the promise already to the people of Israel when He brought them out of Egypt. For this wonderful news—the message that God wants to save us—has been given to us just as it was to those who lived in the time of Moses. But it didn’t do them any good because they didn’t believe it. They didn’t mix it with faith. Hebrews 4:2
The most important ingredient in living a fulfilling life, according to God’s plan, appears to be faith. Hebrews 11:6.
You see that his (Abraham’s) faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. James 2:22.
Here are the essential ingredients for a healthy Christian life:
To one measure of faith
Add one measure of goodness;
Mix in one measure of knowledge;
Add a heaped measure of self-control;
Keep mixing it all with perseverance;
Remember to fold in godliness;
Don’t forget the zest of mutual affection;
Serve with love.
For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1:5-8 NIV
We are not left alone ‘in the middle of nowhere’ to mix our own ingredients in any way we wish. Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Ephesians 4:11-13 NIV
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