Month: June 2011

Bean flour vs Chocolate

I try to cook mostly GF/CF. It does seem to help my son and I be able to handle the ambiguities of life with more flexibiliity. In honor of that, my mom gave me a GF flour blend for Christmas.

I finally gave it a try today. It lent an excellent texture to the cookies and muffins I baked. However, the blend had fava bean flour in it – a flour that I have avoided thus far, because I am not a fava bean fan.

The gingerbread cookie spices were able to mask the bean flavor enough so that there is just a mild vegetablely aftertaste. Unfortunately, fava beans are the winner in the battle of the double chocolate muffins.

I will be able to eat the muffins, but it was a no-go for my daughter. Since she doesn’t need to eat GF I’ll make some new “regular” muffins for her tomorrow (maybe this afternoon, if we get back in time from my son’s social skills cllass). Hmm, I better add wheat flour to my shopping list.

 

Why does God want to be my friend?

God wants to be your friend because He likes you. It makes Him happy to be your friend. Another reason that He wants to be your friend is because He wants to help you be happy. He wants to help you with your probems and he wants to give you interesting things to do that will make you feel joyful and at peace.

Do you have a pet that you like? If so, why do you like that pet? Is it because that pet makes you feel happy. Do you enjoy making your pet happy, too by taking care of it and finding fun things for it to do? Then you understand just a little bit about how God feels about you.

Or maybe you really enjoy playing computer games. Why do you like them? Is it because playing them makes you feel happy? Well, that is how God feels about being your friend.

“He will take great delight in you.” Zephaniah 3:17

We think differently, but we aren’t aliens!

My favorite search string that brought someone to my blog today: “Do people with Asperger’s Syndrome feel pain?”

What do you say, all of you with AS? I guess I should appreciate the fact that someone is trying to understand us. That is good. But, really? Of course we feel pain. We may react to it differently than expected for many reasons. See my post titled, “Asperger’s and Pain.”

Why are we here?

Devotions for kids on the spectrum

An eight-year-old I know, who has ASD, asked her mom, “Why are we born, if we are just going to die?” I remember thinking about similar things when I was young.

This is what I have come to learn. God created us to be His friend. He wants to be friends with us forever, but he does not want to force us to be his friend. He wants us to decide if we want to be friends with Him.

That is what this life is for. We are born, and are given the opportunity to meet God. We learn about him and decide if we want to be friends with him. If we decide that we do want to be His friend, we get to go to heaven when we die. He also helps us while we are still here on earth.

 “LORD, the God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below—you who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way.” 1Kings 8:23

Lest you think I am a proponet of, “name it and claim it”…

Yesterday a friend and I had tickets to the Twins game. The game was to start at 7 pm. The rain was forcasted to come through between 4 and 6 pm. I didn’t want to be guilty of not bringing my requests before God, so I again commanded that the weather behave itself for my outing. Yes, I used the same amount of faith that I had used on Sunday.

However, this time, God decided that I was not acting in His will, and saw fit to allow it to really pour (for Minnesota – nothing like what I have experienced in Florida, though!) from 5:30 pm until, well, I don’t know exactly when it ended. The game was delayed until 8 pm, and then postponed to a date TBD in August. My friend and I hiked through the downpour to the Rock Bottom Brewery, a local restaurant I would highly recommend. I guess their alcohol is amazing, though I wouldn’t know. But their food is wonderful. My friend and I shared some scrumptious lobster and shrimp mac and cheese, then washed that down with a mocha sundae that I wouldn’t have minded having more of, despite the fact that my stomach was near bursting (we had already had some food at the ball park before the game had been called). We found the precipitation quite light when we left for home at 10: 30 pm; it had stopped by the time I reached my door 30 minutes later.

So why did God answer my prayer on Sunday but not on Tuesday? It was the same prayer, prayed in the same way. The Bible says God will grant me anything that I ask in Jesus name, right? Well, here’s the caveat that many of us miss. “In Jesus name,” does not simply mean that we say, “in Jesus name,” and mean it. It means that we are praying something that Jesus agrees with, something that is absolutely in God’s will. For instance, if an official in a kingdom acts in the name of the king, they are doing something that the king has already said they could do, something that he agrees with.

In other words, when I prayed about the weather on Sunday, it was something that God agreed with, so he allowed my words to be fulfilled. When I prayed on Tuesday, is was not something he agreed with, so my words were not fulfilled. Quite frankly, I was being lazy on Tuesday. I should have first prayed, asking God what his will for the weather was, before wasting my time just praying for what I wanted.

Jesus’ prayers were always answered because He only prayed for what he already knew God wanted. If we want our prayers to be answered, we need to do the same thing – ask God what His will is, before we start blabbing 🙂