Something I’ve heard over and over again from our leaders here is that flexibility is a virtue. I think that’s true across the board in life, but especially in a country where so much is uncertain. That's not to say that I am really good at it - I often struggle when things mess up my plans. That's one of those things God's working at in me!
Here’s a look into one aspect of my life here.
Josh & I love to have people in for dinner and generally try to have Mission Home guests (generally the guests are our interior co-workers) in for dinner at least once during their stay. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what’s going on in their lives and in their work, not to mention getting to know them better. The kids love it too.
This week, we invited our Korean friends in for dinner – they got here late last week. I wanted to keep it easy so I planned to do grilled pork chops (easy 'cause Josh does them!), seasoned roasted potato wedges, salad, bread and a dessert. Josh went to take the meat out of the freezer this morning and said, “Josie, I think we used the rest of the pork chops last week. All I could find was a pork roast.” Ok, so I’ll change the menu a bit – Garlic Pork Roast with Sour Cream Gravy, Garlic Mashed Potatoes, Salad, Bread and dessert. Since we can’t get sour cream here, I’ll use my homemade yogurt instead – should work just fine – in both the gravy and the mashed potatoes. So while the meat thaws, I scour cook books to find an easy dessert recipe that’s not brownies – I’ve been making those a lot lately. Then I remember that Barbara and friends sent me a lemon cake mix – that will be easy. I check online to find out how to make Lemon Poppyseed Cupcakes with the mix, get those started, and then check on the meat.
What I see causes me to call Josh, who’s walking through the dining room to get some water. It’s FISH, not a roast! Well, it's already thawed, so we're going to have to use it. OK – so I make sure Josh is willing to do the frying – we still have some of that great seasoning mix that my parents brought this past summer, so we’ll fry up the fish, change the potatoes back to potato wedges, keep on with the salad, bread and dessert.
I’m thinking the garlic heads I have ready to go into the oven to roast (doused in olive oil and wrapped in foil) will still have to be roasted, but that’s great smeared on fresh homemade bread, so that will still be OK. Less than 2 hours until our guests will arrive – gotta feed Katrina, Josh has to run over to the corner store for some lemons (which I saw there when I picked up some extra garlic heads) for the fish, and we’re good to go! How’s that for flexible!!!? The good thing is that while generally this kind of upheaval is somewhat upsetting, today it didn’t really bother me! PTL!
A few hours later… I didn’t think anything else would probably change after I wrote the above – but… last minute we added 2 more guests. They were staying at the mission home and as no one was aware there were no dinner plans for them, Josh offered to order dinner in from a restaurant for them (they don’t speak the local language). We ended up deciding to just have them join us instead. Josh went and bought more fish and there was a lot of the other stuff (including a papaya I had my helper cut up last minute before the left today), so we were fine. We had a good time!
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