{"id":2593,"date":"2012-11-27T03:00:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/?p=2593"},"modified":"2013-11-07T11:49:03","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T19:49:03","slug":"trouble-and-tea-meet-in-dorcas-smuckers-teapot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/2012\/trouble-and-tea-meet-in-dorcas-smuckers-teapot\/","title":{"rendered":"Trouble and Tea Meet in Dorcas Smucker’s Teapot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Closing his devotional at a recent Hopewell<\/a> business meeting, our former bishop remarked that he’d been reading a new book that afternoon and had a quote for us:<\/p>\n

“The big decisions are the ones that transcend every place and relationship and job — integrity and kindness, mercy and generosity, love and joy and justice.”<\/div>\n

When he concluded with “by Dorcas Smucker,” I knew which book he’d been reading. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

A few days after that, I was chatting a bit with one of my high school Spanish students. She had just slipped back into school from her first round of chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Thanking me for a book I had sent to her while she was hospitalized, she added, “It made me laugh, which was good.” Yes, since “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine”<\/span> (Proverbs 17:22), a cancer patient laughing is surely a good thing.<\/p>\n

Those two anecdotes demonstrate why I like the latest of Dorcas Smucker’s books. I pour myself a cupload of it for the hilarity…and am not disappointed. Then I discover the life lessons…and am blessed or challenged (and, at times, both).<\/p>\n

It is a very strange thing to find an old tradition and habit of mine suddenly featured as cutting edge and The Latest Fad, since my daughters and friends will testify that the words “cutting edge” and I almost never appear in the same sentence. (26)<\/p>\n

Can the child who eventually stays in this area understand that my flutter of excitement at another’s arrival doesn’t mean that I love this one more, that one less? (73)<\/p>\n

I wonder about gifts and gratitude and why, so often, more of the one results in less of the other. (21)<\/p>\n

Who knew one could find a sense of discovery and purpose in washing and reusing Ziploc bags until they wore out? (28)<\/p><\/div>\n

I haven’t read all my way through Tea and Trouble Brewing<\/em>. I might never. You see, while I’ve sipped several chapters using my own eyeballs, mostly I’ve swigged away happily with my eardrums. \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n

I lie on the floor and listen to my wife read the book to me.<\/div>\n

Whether I use a lens or a cochlea, what of it? The literary delights still end up in my brain anyway. Besides, since Ruby grew up just down the road from where Dorcas lives, I get extras that no commercial audio version would have (were it even available):<\/p>\n