ruth – The Faith Cafe

Posted on May 15, 2023April 18, 2023 by Lori Cartmell

Turning the Bitter Sweet

“Go suck a lemon!”

Have you ever heard anyone say that?

It means they’re annoyed with you and want you to experience something unpleasant. Lemon juice is so sour that it makes your mouth pucker.

But if lemon juice is so bitter, why are lemon desserts so yummy?

It’s thanks to the addition of a sweetener.

I like lemon-based desserts much better than orange-flavoured ones. It seems to me that the combination of sour and sweet is what makes lemon desserts so satisfying (see below for Lemon Poppyseed Cake recipe).

They say when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

No, when life hands you lemons, turn it over to God.

He can transform your unwelcome experiences into something good, and make the bitter waters of your life sweeter than any lemonade.

Posted on June 3, 2021May 14, 2021 by Lori Cartmell

The Dark Side of the Moon

Is the “dark side” of the moon truly as dark as we think it is?

From Earth, we only see one side of our companion satellite. The moon is “tidally locked” with our planet, with the result that it always presents the same face to us.

Because we can’t see the side of the moon facing away from the Earth, we sometimes assume that it’s in perpetual darkness.

But this isn’t so. The “dark side” of the moon (which should more accurately be called the “far side”) gets just as much sunlight as the face we see. All sides of the moon receive the sun’s light equally in turn.

From the sun’s perspective, the moon doesn’t have a dark side at all.

It’s our perspective that throws us off and leads us to the wrong conclusion.

We can easily fall prey to misconceptions about our own lives, too. When we don’t have the right perspective, we can assume that things are darker than they really are.

Naomi in the Old Testament Book of Ruth certainly made this mistake.

Posted on May 25, 2020 by Lori Cartmell · 1 Comment

Lick The Bowl!

Child happily licking the bowl of cookie dough
Photo by pxfuel

When I was a little girl, I always loved baking cookies with my Mom. The best part was when I “helped” her clean the mixing bowl.

Many people have fond memories of their Moms letting them “lick the bowl”: that is, scraping up and eating the bits of leftover cookie dough on the sides of the bowl.

My Mom would go one better than that, however. She’d deliberately leave not just the scrapings, but extra spoonfuls of cookie dough in the bowl for me to eat. Sometimes I wonder if more of the dough ended up in my stomach than on the cookie sheets to bake!

Isn’t God like that with us, too? He sometimes gives us unexpected favour or extra blessings in our lives just to show us how much He loves us.

We find an illustration of this favour in the beautiful Biblical story of Ruth.