Picture from PBS article see link at bottom
Your tongue is similar to a fingerprint, did you know that?
Your tongue’s imprint is unique to your own body, it is just as unique as your fingerprint and can be used in identification. It is not that criminals are going around licking things or anything, but I found this to be an interesting fact. It will probably be one of those useless pieces of information that I do remember, instead of important things like, what did I go into the kitchen to get?
A Koala bear has fingerprints, or I guess it is rather, pad prints, similar to and as unique as human fingerprints, so close in fact that they could be interchanged and no one could tell the difference. Again, it is not that criminals are rounding up Koalas and using them to commit crimes but you have to admit it is quite fascinating information.
There are so many interesting things out there if we keep ourselves open to them.
I have been working with Tallow for the past couple months. I had not heard of Tallow before. Did you know that cooking with animal fats is actually helping your body protect itself from chronic inflammation and heart disease?
Tallow is made from either beef, bison or sheep fat. I had heard of suet because we used to feed it to the birds. Suet is the fat surrounding the animals kidneys, known as lean fat. Tallow is made when suet is rendered or cooked down to filter it and take the impurities out. Tallow was a staple of our pioneers and homesteaders for hundreds of years, it is what they had. They cooked with it, made soap from it and baked with it.
Lard is made from pigs and did you know, that in pasture raised pigs the lard can be as high in vitamin D as cod liver oil.
Schmaltz, a common staple of the Jewish community, is the rendered fat of a chicken or goose.
There are so many misconceptions about animals fats and when I took my courses in the health food industry we learned that heart disease did not come on the scene until margarine took over the butter industry in the 1950’s. In fact, vegetable oils, and margarine have been linked to poor health, obesity and inflammation by a number of studies and medical facilities.
I have always thought that if God made it – it has to be good. So, butter, honey, eggs, tallow, milk, cream all grace my table and my cooking. I am experimenting with tallow in creams and lotions – it makes a delightful moisturizer.
Not all things new are good and sometimes it makes sense to do your own research before you believe the “studies called science”, as in the case for margarine.
I can hear some of you groaning because we all want soft “butter” for our toast instead of trying to spread a cold hard slab around tearing up the bread. We found a great butter dish and kept it in the cupboard instead of resorting to margarine.
I know, todays blog seems totally random, different thoughts thrown together and it looks like the dots do not connect. Stating the obvious, God made all of these things would be the first connecting point.
The second would be that if we looked at our life, it would also seem to be a series of random events all put together much like this collection.
But is it really? A series of random events all thrown together? Or is there some behind the scenes orchestration going on?
If we had a tuba and started practicing, at first we would probably hear short noisy blasts of tuba noises coming out of the instrument. If we kept at it and took lessons and kept practicing, we might eventually begin to recognize some musical notes resembling a tune coming out of it.
The same could be said of any musical instrument, all require time, practice and training.
Now put those instruments together as a collection in an orchestra and you end up with some incredibly beautiful music. Did the music just randomly happen? No. It required all the hours of practicing that each music player endured and persevered at in order to be good enough to play together.
If we had only known the tuba player and heard the first notes they played way back at the beginning, we might never have believed that player might ever play in an orchestra of beautiful music. But the dots finally connected.
When we started out as children we could never have envisioned our life 50 or 60 years later, that would make us “so old!” We do not have the skills required to see into the future. We would not be able to connect the dots from the random events that have happened to us, a lifelong pattern that is “our life”. But woven together, these random events have the makings of a beautiful tapestry that God has been orchestrating from the beginning of our life.
God is the only one who can see the end from the beginning. He works in our lives to move and shape us into the people He wants us to be. He uses the “random” events and even plans them. In the Bible God calls Himself the “potter” and “we are the clay”. (Isaiah 64:8, Jeremiah 18, Romans 9:21). He fashions us and creates us into the purposes He decided to give us.
God had a calling, a purpose, a mission for your life. When He created you, He pulled back the bow and launched the arrow into the sphere that we call earth. He launched you with a purpose, a unique and very great purpose.
Many of us wonder and long to know what this purpose is. Did you know that if you sat down and wrote out many of the “random events” of your life, your purpose would probably start to show up, the dots might start to connect.
You would notice that many of the events have a common thread, something that is being pulled together into a target area – your purpose. We were never put here on earth to be selfish and alone, we were put here to have a relationship with God and then with each other.
God foresaw who He was going to make you to be, you know, who you were going to be when you grew up…..
It was not your choice, God ordained it. But to give you your purpose when you were a child, it would be silly. Your purpose would be too big for you, to enormous to even think about. Just like the baby shower I was at a couple weeks ago, there was some newborn clothes but many were for down the road when the baby grew into them. Those clothes would look silly on a newborn but in six months or a year, they will fit perfectly.
Did you catch it, just like the baby, when we grow into our purpose, then the dots will start to come together and we will start to see the pattern and that there really was a purpose to all of it.
God says, “I know the plans I have for you….” Jeremiah 29:11 He knows.
I for one, loved to do pen pal letters in school, I was the family writer of letters, I loved to journal and I had no idea I was a writer. It was years later for that revelation to hit me. But when I started to look back, I was writing a lot over the course of my life and then it started to make sense. God already knew I would write and even once someone called me a “scribe”. A scribe is the record keeper, the minute taker, the person who noted down history or what God was saying. It was and is a profession. I guess it was not an accident I was an admin person, who took meeting minutes, a “record” clerk for the Ministry of Health.
I have been creating and inventing recipes forever, it gives me joy to create and mix things together and come up with a good ending: a meal, a dessert, a cream, a lotion, a piece of wood into an item.
To close, I have no idea how a koala bear, a tongue print or tallow all go together but I know in my life, foraging and creating from nature has been something I have done for years – now I make things to sell, it has come together. I write, record events and teach things to others with my writing. All of the things would have made no sense by themselves, but together they describe my life and the coolest part is that I am not finished yet, there is still more to come. God is not finished with us until the day He takes us home.
As my mom loved to say, “it is a poor day when you are not learning something,” and truly it is because we should be always learning and looking to see who each of us will be, “when we grow up.”
Article from above picture: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/koala-fingerprints/
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