Chestnuts & Pomegranates
Fans, short-sleeve shirts, & mosquitos made it feel more like June than October on the third of this month. We just completed our second annual discipleship conference and we were running the air conditioner with fans the entire time. By this time, we’ve already experienced our “seasonal-shift.” What I mean by seasonal-shift is that the seasons are so full and so pronounced here in the North that there are a few days a year where you can actually feel the dividing-time as one season overtakes another. Strangely later than usual, a beautiful lightning storm rolled in on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, the smell of the air was different, the color of the light had changed, and the weather had a crispness to it. Fall had arrived and Summer wasn’t coming back.
To digress for a moment, the discipleship conference was a lot of work and a great success. We had around 32 people training to be one-to-one disciplers. Also, after a year of effort, we were able to announce that we have completed the translation of all of the discipleship material into Italian. With this, we can assist many churches across Italy to care for their new believers and preserve a legacy within an embattled nation. There’s still a fair amount of work to accomplish before we’re able to assist Italy on a larger scale, but we reached our first milestone.
With the arrival of Fall comes the harvest and the many culinary tastes that accompany it. Pumpkin is often mixed into the sauces on pastas and two long-anticipated delights are reaped: chestnuts and pomegranates. Italy has wonderful pomegranates, second only to Israel in my opinion. We’ll devour a couple of these tomorrow. By the way, there is a lot easier way to eat this great fruit than picking at it seed by seed. If you would like to have this “fruit-hack,” just let me know and I’ll be glad to share it with you.
The joy of chestnuts, on the other hand, is when we roast them over our stove here at the house. The fragrant smoke they emit fills the entire house. Couple the roasted chestnuts with ice-cold Vanilla Coke and you’ve got an unbeatable combination that makes it worth living in Italy the whole year. Tonight, I was able to re-acquaint the kiddos with this harvest tradition. What a blast! Reilly’s quickly picked up the intricacies of shelling them well and eating them quick. Things like this make for great memories.
Tonight, Sandy is up in the Dolomites with a group of women from our Church. This weekend is our Women’s Breakthrough Weekend. The Men’s will follow in a couple weeks. These are also times of great memories as many men and women have their lives changed through the work of the Holy Spirit. All of these great things happen in the Fall.
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It’s been a loooooooooong time since a new entry. I do pray that all is going well with the Krause family and the ministries there.
Comment by Ann Rees — 1/19/2007 @ 4:20 pm