Fall-Fabulous Eats!

So after my INTENSE last post, I thought I should probably lighten things up a bit and talk food.  My family loves food, especially desserts!  As I've mentioned before, Madelynn and I have been experimenting with cooking and baking.  Our favorite thing to bake is cupcakes and we are always searching for new recipes to finesse and make our own.  I absolutely love spending time with her in the kitchen!  Those are memories that I will cherish forever and I hope she does as well.

Last Friday, we decided to bring a little Fall into our kitchen and try out a recipe I found on Pinterest for Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing.  We played with the ingredients a bit to make it our own and Oooooh are they fabulous!  They were a hit at our small group meeting and they are quickly disappearing here at home.  Here's our recipe:

Cake:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 sticks unsalted butter softened
1 cup white granulated sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
1 1/2ish cups pumpkin puree

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Line muffin pans with cupcake liners (for ours we used super cute Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin liners that I found at Michael's craft store).  Combine all dry ingredients (including spices) in a medium bowl and set aside.  Cream together butter and both sugars.  Add eggs one at a time.  Gradually add dry ingredients and milk (I add a little dry, little milk, little dry, etc. until both were gone).  Mix with hand mixer on medium speed until well incorporated.  Add in pumpkin and mix until smooth.  Fill liners 2/3 full and bake for about 18 minutes until toothpick inserted in the center of one cupcake comes out clean.  Allow to cool in pan 5 minutes then move to wire cooling rack to cool completely.

Icing:
1 1/2 sticks butter softened
8 oz cream cheese softened
4 cups confectioner's sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon

Beat butter and cream cheese together until well incorporated.  Gradually add in sugar.  Mix in vanilla and cinnamon.  Beat until smooth and creamy.  Ice cupcakes.  This icing pipes really well.  Because I have not invested in fancy piping bags and such, I just fill a gallon size plastic storage bag, snip a bit off one of the bottom corners, and pipe the icing onto the cupcakes with that.  I think it still comes out pretty!

After we piped on the icing we added on cute jack-o-lantern decorative picks that we found at Wal-Mart.  Voila!  Fabulous pumpkin cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese icing!  I love how you can see the flecks of cinnamon in the icing.  The cake was very moist and tasted like lighter, slightly sweeter pumpkin bread and the icing was just sweet enough, with a subtle cinnamon taste.  If you are a cinnamon lover, you could probably add a bit more to the icing without overpowering the cake.  This recipes makes around 30 cupcakes. 

Bon appetite and happy Fall, with love from our kitchen to yours,
Madelynn & Erin

Learning to Forgive

Alright y’all, bear with me because this might be a little long and it definitely could be triggering for some people.  Please read with caution and if you need support or have questions during or afterwards, please don’t hesitate to contact me or someone else who may be a support to you.

If someone had asked me a few months ago if I was a forgiving person I would have definitely and adamantly replied in the affirmative.  I used to believe that forgiving came easy to me, and I have actually been told that I may be a little “too forgiving”.  Lately, however, I have been feeling God clearly speak to me – challenge me really – about forgiveness.  I have been flooded by beautiful messages, sermons, songs, Scriptures, books, and discussions focusing on, or referencing forgiveness.  I have felt an almost incessant tugging on my heart, showing me the dark, heavy areas where I still carry anger, pain, and bitterness – unforgiveness.

And so, I have begun a process, asking for God’s help in releasing the anger and the pain, and helping me to move toward further healing and forgiveness.  For me, it is about trusting that God is good and that He wants greater things for me; trusting in His plan for my life, not the image of a perfect life that I have created in my head.  In this process I have been doing a lot of praying, a lot of seeking support, and a lot of reading.  I have discovered that in order for me to move on I have to do two major things.  The first is that I have to actually own my feelings and the cause(s) for those feelings – all of the hurt, pain, anger, guilt, and regret – and I have to be willing to openly discuss them, especially with those who might help me or with those who might be blessed in some way through them.  The second is that I have to fully understand and grab hold of what it means to forgive – all of the whys, whats, hows, whens, etc.

So, for the first part, though I feel a bit – OK a lot – of discomfort in the pit of my stomach as I prepare to compose this section, I feel compelled to share a bit of my story, which is becoming part of my testimony.  I was raped when I was 15 years old.  There.  I said it.  I was dating a 19 year-old “good Catholic boy” from a “good Catholic family” at the time (anyone see a small problem here already?  Not the Catholic part but the 19 year-old guy when I was 15 part?)  I was raised in a Catholic family, though I wouldn’t necessarily call us incredibly devout.  I went to Catholic schools from second through seventh grade, until we moved to SC when I was in the eighth grade.  Because of my dad’s work situation, we moved around quite a bit when I was a kid.  As you can imagine, going from private to public school, in the eighth grade, in an entirely different state no less, was very hard on me.  I had some difficulty making friends and I found myself feeling pretty depressed and making stupid decisions.  In ninth grade, I had a class with the aforementioned fella.  We talked and flirted quite a bit and I discovered that he had a job at a local grocery store.  One day, while my mom was shopping, she passed my phone number to him and encouraged him to call me.  Later that week, he did just that, and with my parents’ OK we set up a date for a week or so later – my first date ever.  After about a month or so of dating, we set up a “double date” with his friend, also 19 and in college, and his friend’s girlfriend, neither of whom I had ever met.  I thought we were going out to dinner somewhere, but soon learned we were going to this friend’s house.  The others started drinking beer.  I was offered one but refused as I had not gotten into the drinking scene as of yet and didn’t want to then.  Awhile later the guys took us back to a bedroom on the promise of showing us an awesome collection of baseball memorabilia (I was a naïve 15 year-old girl and I happened to love baseball).  It was there that my date raped me, on the floor of that room, while his friend and the other girl were doing their own thing right there on the bed.  It wasn’t the rape you see in movies.  There was no violence or screaming, but I was clearly saying “no” and he was clearly ignoring me.  I know that the other couple knew what was happening and I have recently realized that I have been holding onto anger toward them as well. 

Afterwards, he drove me home in awkward silence.  I was in a state of shock.  I hardly remember the drive home.  The thought to get as far away from him as quickly as possible didn’t even cross my mind.  At my house, he didn’t walk me to the door as he had on previous dates.  As I numbly climbed out of his car, he said with faux sweetness, “hey that was fun.  Let’s not talk about this OK?”  I vaguely remember nodding.  He sped away as I went inside and said a brief hello to my parents, then immediately took a scalding hot shower, scrubbing every square inch of my skin until it was red, and went to bed.  I never heard from him again and I avoided the grocery store where he worked, as well as any other place that I might accidentally run into him.

That night changed my life.  I became severely depressed, though I was very skilled at hiding it.  I covered my pain with alcohol, cutting (though this was sort of an unknown phenomenon at the time), and other destructive behaviors.  I have no idea how my parents didn’t recognize it.  Maybe they did and were too scared or hurt to ask questions.  I know they just wanted me to be happy and to fit in.

It wasn’t long after that, desperate for male attention, I got into a relationship with another guy.  I was still 15 when I met him and he was almost 17.  This relationship was unhealthy almost from the start.  It quickly turned into verbal, emotional, sexual, and physical abuse.  I was called awful names, threatened, sexually assaulted, locked in a bathroom while he watched porn and smoked pot, cheated on, pushed, and hit.  Not long into the relationship I truly believed that I was worthless, that I could do no better than this, and that I deserved every bit of what was happening.  I guess I understood on some level that what was happening was wrong but I felt powerless to get out of it, and after every “bad” episode, he would shower me with love and gifts and promise me that he would never do it again.  Let me tell you that this actually happens quite a bit to teenage girls.  It is not just a phenomenon for older and/or married women.  The level of manipulation and fear is such that ending the relationship seems impossible.

Eventually, after about two years (yes I said two years), I did end it.  It was one particularly violent episode, where I had no choice but to involve my parents because their vehicle was on the receiving end of a couple of whacks from a baseball bat.  The sick part of me still wanted to be with him, but my parents stepped up and made it too difficult.  He became frustrated with me and my new restrictions.  He refused to see me most of the time when I would attempt to defy my parents and make contact with him, and his involvement with other girls became more blatant.  By this time I was 17, using alcohol and drugs, cutting, promiscuous, suicidal, and well on my way to a full blown eating disorder.

Long, long story short, a few months before my 18^th birthday, God sent my now husband into my life.  If it wasn’t for this young fella (I say young because the Hubs had just turned 16 when I met him), and of course, the grace of God, I honestly do not know where I would be, if not dead, today.  It is the loving grace and mercy of God that saved my life with as few scars as possible then, and it is the loving grace and mercy of God that saved me in April 2012, over 20 years after the rape, when I finally truly surrendered my life to Jesus Christ.  Because of Jesus, I do not have to allow the horrors of my past define me and my present or my future.

Which leads me to that second major thing: fully understanding forgiveness.  I am the type of person that prefers to know, if not completely understand the whys, whats, hows, whens, etc. before I can truly buy into something.  (Go ahead and call me a Type A overanalyzer.  I claim that title and am working on it.)  The concept of forgiveness is no exception.  I have turned to several credible sources, not the least of which is The Holy Bible, to help me with this.  What I have come to understand is that forgiveness is more for me than for the person/people I am forgiving.  As my gifted pastor, Perry Noble, notes in his book Unleash!, “Holding unforgiveness in my heart and expecting it to hurt my abusers is the equivalent of drinking poison myself and expecting it to kill the other guy”.  There was a part of me that wanted the people who had hurt me to suffer as much, or more, than I have.  I had a therapist once, who had me visualize a way to get revenge on and torture the guy who raped me.  As a therapist myself, I understand what she was doing.  She wanted me to get angry!  At that time I was still so lost in the pain that I could not even imagine being mad.  Really, though, imagining revenge does me no good and believing that if I hung onto my anger and refused to forgive them that I was somehow hurting them, was delusional.  I was really only hurting myself and my relationship with God.

I believed that if I forgave the people who hurt me that I was then OK with what they had done to me.  I have come to understand that giving forgiveness is not the same as giving approval.  As simple as this sounds, this has been one of the hardest things for me to grasp.  I had this idea in my head that if I forgave people then I was OK with what they did to me; that forgiveness somehow included endorsement.  With lots or praying I am beginning to understand that this is not the case.  I can surely and sincerely forgive without saying that it is OK that I was hurt or that anyone else should ever be hurt in those ways.

I believed that I needed to receive a sincere apology – an acknowledgment that what was done to me was wrong – before I could forgive “big stuff” like this.  (Interestingly I’m pretty OK with forgiving the “little stuff” without an apology.  The definitions of “big” vs. “little” stuff are unclear and probably depend on my mood if I’m being totally honest.)  The fact is that I will probably never get apologies from these two guys and, really, that’s OK.  I know that one day they will have to stand before the Lord God and account for their lives – for these things that they did to me and likely to other girls.  It is not that I seek revenge any longer.  Not even revenge from God.  It’s just that I know that my God is good and just and is far more capable than I (Psalm 111:7 and Revelation 16:7).  Besides, my Father God loves me and thinks I’m priceless, and He will always stand up for me (Psalm 36:7 and Ephesians 2:4 and 1 John 4:16).  I don’t need their apologies, but my Father God certainly does!

Here’s the thing, and it may be the most important thing: God wants us to forgive – not just the “little stuff” but the “big stuff” too!  He sent his only Son to die a horrible death in order for our sins to be forgiven, so do we not owe Him forgiveness of others in return?  Who am I to withhold forgiveness when I, myself, have been forgiven?  Now I can honestly say that no, I have never raped anyone.  I have never intentionally abused another human being or animal for that matter.  I have, however sinned, and The Bible tells us that sin is sin is sin and my sins – all of them past, present, and future – have been forgiven.  Take a look at what Jesus says in Matthew 18:21-35 and in Matthew 6:14-15.  What about Luke 23:34 where Jesus asks God for forgiveness for the soldiers who are murdering Him!  Wow!

Forgiveness is really, really hard.  It is especially hard when you have been hurt to the extreme – where you lose something that you can never, ever get back.  I’ll be honest and admit that I have not magically forgiven overnight the people who hurt me.  It really is a process and I still have days where I can feel that bitter, dark, “you owe me” place in my heart and soul.  Those days, however, are getting fewer and farther between.  On those days I pray that God will help me release and take over so that I may heal a bit more and grow closer to Him.  I lay my anger and pain at the foot of the cross and I trust God to take care of me.  I know with all of my heart that He has not brought me this far, through so much fire, just so that I can fail now.