Depending on Fried Pies and Donuts

My family moved a few times while I was growing up. Each time we found our familiar tribe in a small local church congregation. Today we would say we found community and “did life” together. But these ties were stronger than community. They were family. And we really did life together. I realize now that the women in those churches were not only my spiritual mammas, but my first role models of grit, hard work, and economic wonder. They kept our churches afloat.

My first church was in the Texas panhandle in a little town named Dumas. The ladies axillary augmented the church budget by selling fried pies every week. My mom joined maybe a dozen other women on Friday morning to make the famous fried pies of the Dumas Pentecostal Church. One group cooked up fruit filling, while another mixed and rolled out the pie dough in little circles. Another group spooned in the fruit filling and folded the dough over into half-moons. The last few women in the assembly line mashed a fork to crimp the edges before dropping each pie into vats of hot grease. 

Our church depended on those fried pies.

When I was almost four, we moved to south Texas and found family again in an even smaller congregation. The women in the Wharton church paid the utility bills by selling fresh glazed donuts.  There were four of them, so my mom made the fifth member of the donut team. Three of the five women worked outside the home which was a little unusual in the mid-sixties. It meant they had to make the donuts outside of work hours. So they met in the church annex early on Thursday mornings before work to mix the yeast dough in large galvanized metal tubs. To call the room a kitchen might be an overstatement. They had a stove and a sink and later my parents donated their old refrigerator. But the women ‘made do.’

They covered the dough with tea towels and left the yeast to do its work through the day. Thursday evenings after work they came back to fry and glaze the donuts. They threaded several donuts at a time on long wooden dowels and wiggled them into large pans of popping hot grease. They used the dowels for turning, retrieving and dunking the donuts into large bins of icing. At last they suspended the dowels while the excess icing dripped off. 

I can still smell the grease and the powdered sugar. On Friday mornings my mom would load me in the car with several white sacks of donuts and make her rounds to the businesses who were her regular customers. 

Sometimes I got to eat one, but only one, because our church depended on those glazed donuts.

The practice of women supporting the Lord’s work began with the earliest followers of Jesus Christ.

                Many women were there, watching from a distance. They had followed Jesus from Galilee to care for his needs. [Matthew 27:55, NIV]

As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. [Acts 17:12, NIV]

Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, those women who work hard in the Lord. Greet my dear friend Persis, another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord. [Romans 16:12, NIV]

Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, … [Philippians 4:3, NIV]

I honor the New Testament women who followed Christ.

I honor the women who held up the churches of my childhood with fried pies and donuts.

I honor the women of the faith today who write and preach and serve and give with generosity.

Generations of women putting action behind their faith.

They follow. They believe. They work. They contend. For a gospel too precious to keep to themselves.

SomethingAbout Him

Sharing glimpses of God's presence

through the new normals of our pretty normal lives.

Bobbi Mooney 

When New Normals Don’t Stay

Have there been times in your life when changes came at you too fast? At the pace of spit wads fired from the fifth grader in the back of the class.

Many of life’s changes are good ones, not even resembling spit wads.  But both welcomed and unwelcomed changes create a period of adjustment until they are rated as the ‘new normal.’ I find a certain comfort when the latest new change isn’t new anymore and I feel settled again.

Sometimes the changes come so rapidly, there isn’t time to settle in. I was reminded of this the last few weeks watching my daughter and her newborn baby. With babies, just when you’ve found your rhythm, they hit a growth spurt and change up the schedule.  About the time their swaddles and mittens are normal, they free their arms and legs and then onesies become the new normal.

Change is often caused by growth. Things change because we change. Stagnation is not a normal we want to stay in.

Change. Grow. Find your new normal.

It is cyclic.

Change. Grow. Find your new normal.

The other thing I know about change is it is the only thing that stays the same. Change is constant. Once we accept that changes are going to keep knocking on our door, we can get ready to open the door.

First look through the peephole and determine if you need to call the police. Some changes are meant to destroy us, so they just need to be sent away. Some changes I don’t let in and my weapon of choice is prayer because the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. [James 5:16, NKJV]

If the change on the other side of your peephole is one you recognize as difficult but necessary, then gather your strength. I like to do that the same way King David did. But David found strength in the Lord. [1 Samuel 30:6, NIV] After you’ve gathered your strength, open the door and invite your change to sit down for supper and show it where you keep the guest towels.

If the change looks more like FTD delivering a fresh bouquet of flowers, put it in your prettiest vase and write a thank you note to the sender. Remember where your blessings come from and why you are blessed. And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need you will abound in every good work. [2 Cor 9:8, NIV]

Then there are seasons when the knocks on your door come in rapid succession like a stream of trick or treaters, a mix of cute and scary. In these seasons, we sometimes need to lighten our load to sustain our energy and reduce the momentum of the waves of change. We find Paul doing just that in a storm in Acts 27. And because we were exceedingly tempest-tossed, the next day they lightened the ship. On the third day we threw the ship’s tackle overboard with our own hands. [Acts 27:18-19, NKJV] That sounds like some serious load lightening! But wait, there’s more nine verses later on the 14^th day of the storm. So when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship and threw out the wheat into the sea. [Acts 17:38, NKJV] Wow! Now that is difficult re-prioritization! We can’t keep everything on our schedule because we must focus on the changes at hand.

Are you living through a change cycle that is so fast it is messing with your sense of normalcy right now?

It might be a non-stop stretch of bad news that is taking you to the breaking point.

It might be a truckload of blessings that are almost too much to handle at once.

It might be a health problem that throws a new symptom at you every few days.

It might be a new pace that requires you to speed up life or to slow it down.

Just hang on and know that a new normal will come. And then another. And another. Because new normals don’t stay.

What does stay is the anchor of our soul. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. [Heb 6:19, NIV]

Ask Him to go along with you the next time change knocks at your door.