I don’t eat much red meat anyway – I don’t even eat much
chicken, and pork and lamb rarely. Even when I had the butcher nearby I didn’t
eat much meat. I loved stopping by there because I love those guys, but I’d buy
small amounts of things unless it was a big holiday. Where I live now I can get
good prices on pretty good quality meat, and the fish is a good price too. But
I don’t eat much of either one so having the lobster was a real treat.
My father taught me how to clean a lobster when I was
literally standing at his knee. I’ve known how to clean a lobster for as long
as I can remember, and it’s come in handy many times. Years ago when I was a
teenager I worked at a catering company one summer, and they did a lot of
lobster bakes because we were in Massachusetts. Once when we got back to the
storefront, we had crates and crates of cooked lobsters left. The company that
was having the party had overbought and everything was paid for, so we started
packing up lobsters to take home. I have no idea how many I carried with me
that day, but we had a lobster bake of our own at my house that week. Another
time in college they had an outdoor lobster dinner, and for some reason not too
many people were there so I took a few back to my dorm and made a spaghetti
dinner for some friends of mine.People don’t know how to clean lobsters a lot of times, and if you don’t know how to clean them there is a lot of waste. I’m much lazier than my father was – he’d get every last little piece of lobster meat out of even the tiniest parts of the legs – but I’m still pretty good and thorough, and it’s amazing how much you can get out of even a really small lobster if you know what you’re doing. It is tedious, though, and I’d honestly rather have it already cleaned for me. When I was home visiting my mother for her birthday, I treated myself to a lobster roll and even though it was an astronomical price, it was fun to not have to do any work and just enjoy myself.
My father and I used to have a regular date we’d make
together when he was still alive. We’d go out to restaurants that we liked
together – he was a great cook and a real food lover and he always knew the
best restaurants. They weren’t always the most expensive – he knew a good
bargain and found those all the time. He had friends who would take him places
and then he’d take me. One thing we’d do a lot was to go to a place he knew to
have a lobster dinner. We’d order one big one and share it. Lobster is a mess
to clean and it’s much easier to do in a sink, but we’d do it right there at
the table, taking our time over a dinner, wearing lobster bibs and using lots of napkins and those
little wet wipes to keep our hands from getting too sloppy. Whenever I have
lobster I think of my father. It’s one of those things that is inextricably
linked to a person and a time and a place. Waffles too, something that I make
that not a lot of people know how to make either. One of the first kitchen
tools I bought for myself was a waffle iron, and they’re still my favorite
thing to make of those breakfasty kinds of foods.
It’s strange and wonderful how time can change difficult memories into
things that we can feel good about. My father was a very unhealthy man in many
ways, and his waffle making when he decided to do it on a Sunday caused dread
in the hearts of the whole family. He always made a huge mess that he’d leave, after
getting set off about something or other that no one ever knew what exactly it
was but it set him off to the point of having a storming and raging fight with
everyone and then leaving, with the mess he’d made all over the kitchen table. When
my father and I used to go to dinner I was always worried about his health. He was
enormously overweight, and he ate butter and mayonnaise to excess along and all
the other things that I knew would kill him one day. I never knew when our
dinner together would be our last, and even before I understood what praying was I'd be praying that we'd get through that meal safely. He also loved to provoke people and get into
arguments. He knew how to push buttons beyond anything I’ve ever known. He died
when he was 72, and I often wonder if he would have mellowed with age as some
people do, but I’m not too sure. He was one of the most stubborn people I’ve
ever known.
I inherited that stubbornness from him, along with the knowledge
of how to clean a lobster. Cleaning a lobster is something that you can learn,
but it’s also something that you have to have a feel for. There are a lot of
little places where you can find lobster meat in the body of the lobster, but
it’s all mixed in with cartilage and shell and other inedible things. Having a
feel for what the lobster meat feels like is key. Stubbornness is also
something that can be learned, but having a feel for it makes it easier to come
by. I remember once a friend of mine told me I was tough like iron – that’s
something I inherited from my father, and something that’s come in handy
sometimes just like cleaning a lobster.
When I was born again and I started to have the tests and trials
that come to us when we start to live our lives for God, I remember a time when
I was having such a hard time and I wanted to give up so badly and stop doing what
it was that I was doing, even though I knew it was what God wanted me to do. I remember
praying and asking Him for help, crying out to Him to change the situation, and
He answered, “You’ve been stubborn about other things in your life. Be stubborn
for me.” It made me laugh at the time, and reminded me of the qualities He’d put into me
from birth – tough like iron, stubborn as they come, tenacious.I just looked up the word tenacious in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, and it has the perfect definition for the quality I’m thinking of: “Not easily pulled apart,” “Tending to adhere or cling,” “Persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired,” “Retentive.” It comes from the Latin word tenax, which means "tending to hold fast."
1 Thessalonians 5:21 tells us, "Test all things, hold fast what is good." The book of Thessalonians is a letter to the Church of the Thessalonians written jointly by Paul, Silvanus (or Silas) and Timothy. In chapter 1, they begin with these words, "We always thank God for you, and pray for you constantly. As we pray to our God and Father about you, we think of your faithful work, your loving deeds, and the enduring hope you have because of our Lord Jesus Christ." That is from the New Living translation, and I chose that one because of all of the words that have to do with enduring, constancy, and faithfulness. All of the translations use some form of these words, but this one seems to have a focus on the idea of holding fast, the stubbornness for Christ and for the Gospel that we need to have in order to keep walking forward in the walk of faith. If we can continue on with that kind of stubbornness and tenacity, if we can hold fast to what is good, the promise of God in chapter 5:23-24 is ours, "Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, who will also do it." If we can do our part, and God is always faithful to help us do our part, He will do His part because He has called us and He is faithful to do as He has promised.
When the words to the scripture came into my mind, they didn't come completely. I knew there was something that the Spirit was speaking to me about holding fast to the truth and I knew there was a scripture somewhere about that, and so I looked up the words, "hold fast to the truth." I found an article on the website Bible Bulletin Board that was written by J.C. Ryle who lived in the years 1816-1900, http://www.biblebb.com/files/ryle/hold_fast.htm. The article is titled "Hold Fast," and he was writing about true doctrine and false doctrine, and because historically he was writing at a time when there was great division between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, his message is very heavily weighted on proving that the doctrine of the Church of England was the only true doctrine. I am not writing here about arguments of doctrine, but he wrote something very beautiful at the end of his article that I wanted to share, "Last of all, if it be right to 'hold fast that which is good,' let us make sure that we have each laid hold personally upon Christ's truth for ourselves. Reader, it will not save you and me to know all controversies, and to be able to detect everything that is false. Head knowledge will never bring you and me to heaven. . . . Let us see that we each lay hold upon Jesus Christ for ourselves by our own personal faith. Let us see that we each flee for refuge and lay hold upon the hope set before us in His glorious Gospel. Let us do this and all shall be well with us, whatever else may go ill. Let us do this and then all things are ours. The Church may fail. The State may go to ruin. The foundations of all establishments may be shaken. The enemies of truth for a season may prevail; but as for us, all shall be well. We shall have in this world peace, and in the world which is to come life everlasting, for we shall have Christ. Reader, if you have not yet laid hold on this hope in Christ, seek it at once. Call on the Lord Jesus to give it to you. Give Him no rest until you know and feel that you are His. If you have laid hold on this hope, hold it fast. Prize it highly because it will stand by you when everything else fails."
In my life I have been stubborn about a lot of things. I’ve believed in people long after they have shown me that they couldn’t be trusted, I’ve hung onto jobs and apartments and relationships that were toxic. After I was born again, the Lord started to change all that, but He didn’t take away the qualities of stubbornness and tenacity from me, He just started to show me how to use them in much healthier and productive ways. If I could be stubborn about loving a man who was a pathological liar – and yes, I did do that at least twice – now that my eyes were opened I could be stubborn about loving God and loving the people He wanted me to love, no matter what the situation looked like and no matter what those people were doing or what kind of trial I was going through. Instead of being a fool for love I became a fool for the Lord, not caring what other people said about the choices I was making about who I would love and what I would do with my life, the same way I didn’t care in the past, only now I had the Master Planner telling me which way to go instead of my own stubborn desire to do what I wanted and go against the flow. Now when I found myself fighting resistance it wasn’t because of my own stubbornness, but because the Lord of all the universe was asking me to keep standing in the face of adversity.
People sometimes think that when we come to Christ we have
to give up everything about ourselves and become like docile robots. But that’s
not what God wants for our lives at all. He wants us to be the best us we can
be, and all He wants to take away are the things that are holding us back from
the greatest gifts and blessings He has for us. My stubbornness was a liability
when I was using it to stay with people and in places that were killing me, but
now that I’m stubborn for God and His work, the stubbornness has become
something that helps me hold fast and keep on going when I don’t see how things
could possibly work out. It’s the same stubbornness that I learned from my
father that keeps me listening and learning from God.
And it’s God who has taught me how to love my father, and
forgive his trespasses in so many areas of my life. It’s God who has shown me
that my father never had the joy of knowing the healing of God in his life, and
that’s why he was so often so negative and destructive to himself and those around him. It’s God who has helped me to take the
good things that I learned from my father, and to remember the good things
and let the others go. It’s God who has cast a much softer light on the past, so
that I can eat a lobster and smile and say, "Thanks Dad."
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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