The Perfect Centerpiece

By Rhonda Rhea –

There’s hardly anything I enjoy more than a good meal. That’s probably why I don’t cook much.

I guess that’s also why I love, love, love whoever it was who invented the marvelous, miraculous…frozen dinner. What a genius! I owe this person. Everyone talks about those fancy ice sculptures. But me? A frozen family-sized lasagna is a thing of beauty to me. There’s a centerpiece you can sink your teeth into!

Those frozen masterpieces not only rescue those of us who are oven-challenged, but they’re also great for helping with that “what to have for dinner” decision. Anytime I’ve stared blankly into the pantry for more than a few minutes and still can’t decide, I head straight for the freezer. I open that magic door and find, oh glorious day, someone has already decided! Other times when I’m having a bad grocery day and there aren’t enough ingredients in there to put together anything besides a pickle-loaf/noodle/Dorito casserole, I check that freezer—and dinner is done! Some days I just plain don’t want to spend an hour in the kitchen. No problem. In the freezer, dinner is already done! If they made it any easier they would be digesting it for me.

I’m embarrassed to admit how much I depend on my freezer for dinner (though, for the record, I do try to make sure I do all my own digesting). And working in exquisite harmony with my freezer, I can’t forget my microwave. My beautiful, beautiful microwave. We’ve never needed a dinner bell. The beep of the microwave signals everyone that dinner is ready. That beep has become music to my ears.

Seriously, even sweeter music to my ears? The sweet, sweet song of salvation! Our redemption is all about and all through Jesus. When He paid our sin debt on the cross, it was finished. In Jesus, it’s already done!

Just take a look at how the Amplified Bible expresses Hebrews 7:25:  “Therefore He is able also to save to the uttermost (completely, perfectly, finally, and for all time and eternity) those who come to God through Him, since He is always living to make petition to God and intercede with Him and intervene for them.” We might even think of it as a “centerpiece” kind of life, bringing His perfect “peace” to our very “center.”

Jesus saves to the uttermost. Completely and perfectly. Finally and eternally. Sound the beautiful beep, it’s done! He had already decided before the foundation of the world to redeem His children back to himself. And what He decides to do, He does. We don’t have to stew over our redemption. We only have to accept it and live it out.

But speaking of stew, I just heard the microwave sound the dinner bell. It’s playing my song. Though just in case you think I never fix anything at all that’s not frozen, you should know I also make a mean Italian sauce. Never frozen. … It’s from a jar.

Persona Non Au Gratin

By Rhonda Rhea –

Do you know how glorious it is to speak at an event that’s directed by a thoughtful and gracious event coordinator? Those are the trips that are somewhere near heaven. Ah, to be chauffeured about, fed the best meals from the finest restaurants, then transported to a posh hotel, only to find a gorgeous gift basket already delivered to the room. Bubble bath waiting. Bed turned down. Mint on the pillow. It’s good to be queen.

Okay, no one knows as well as I do that I don’t deserve to be treated like a queen. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it, does it?

You know when I truly realize I’ve been unduly treated like royalty? When I get home. It’s like a whiplash back into reality. One second I’m signing books and greeting the complimentary crowds, the next I’m walking in the door to kids who barely manage a deadpan, “Oh Mom, it’s you. I’m glad you’re home–‘cuz we’re out of bread. And somebody must’ve spilled a bunch of milk inside the fridge ‘cuz it smells really nasty in there.”

I’m suddenly “persona non au gratin”—no longer the big cheese. It’s so funny that I can go straight from the applause of a gracious audience to cleaning the cat box.

While I admit I love my short reigns as queen, I have to tell you that there’s something quite comfortable about coming home to bread-fetching, milk-mopping and cat-box-cleaning servitude. Living with an entire brigade of pride police really isn’t a bad thing.

Humility can be so tricky. Once you realize you have it, it’s probably a point of pride—and then it’s gone! The best way to stay humble is to stay focused on Christ, our example. We’re told in Philippians 2:5-8 to have his attitude. “Let this same attitude and purpose and humble mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus:  Let Him be your example in humility. Who, although being essentially one with God and in the form of God, possessing the fullness of the attributes which make God God, did not think this equality with God was a thing to be eagerly grasped or retained, But stripped Himself of all privileges and rightful dignity, so as to assume the guise of a servant (slave), in that He became like men and was born a human being. And after He had appeared in human form, He abased and humbled Himself still further and carried His obedience to the extreme of death, even the death of the cross!” (AMP)

Jesus was true royalty, not the temporary, speaking-event kind. He is rightly called the King of all kings. Yet this passage tells us that He didn’t hang on to those rights as royalty. He pushed them aside on our behalf and took on servant status. Imagine leaving the splendor of a Heaven beyond any five star hotel we can picture to serve and to unselfishly give His life.

I really do want to be like Him. I want to humbly serve before any crowd. And I want to humbly serve as I load my shopping cart with four gallons of milk. The Message phrases Proverbs 15:33b this way: “First you learn humility, then you experience glory.” By His grace, there’s glory before the crowds. I truly believe that in humble surrender, by His grace, there’s glory in the cat box too.

Rhonda Rhea is a radio personality, conference speaker, humor columnist and author of eight books, including High Heels in High Places and the newest, soon-to-be-released, How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Change a Person? You can find out more at www.RhondaRhea.com.

Stringing Along

By Rhonda Rhea –

“Son, did you clean your room?”

“Yeah, Mom, it’s all done.”

Funny how when you look into your teenage son’s room, you find that it’s “all done,” yet things still seem to be swarming in there. Personally, I rarely go in without haz-mat gear.

Teen vision is amazing. I’m nearing the finish line in raising five of them and it’s still remarkable to me that a teenager can look directly at the biggest, ugliest, most disgusting mess and totally not see it.

I opened my microwave not too ago and found a big, fat mound of cheese cooked onto the bottom of the microwave. Someone obviously tried to make one of those nacho mountains. But how could a person zap Mt. Nacho and completely miss the fact that it’s doing a volcano cheese eruption kind of a thing a couple of minutes in? And then how could that teen just walk away and leave all the cheese-lava smoldering there? You would think even a teen would notice something was up when he pulled the plate out, got halfway across the kitchen, then realized the plate was still connected to the microwave by a 6-foot stretchy string of cheese. The only viable answer? Teenage select-a-vision.

Of course, it’s also just about as easy to have selective vision in our spiritual lives sometimes. Isn’t it so much more pleasant to find a fault in someone else than it is to notice a weakness of our own? I don’t even want to think about how many nacho-type messes I’ve noticed in others, all the while stringing along a six-foot-long cheese rope of my own.

But Jesus can give us a different kind of vision. It’s vision that’s not so quick to dismiss our own messes. He asked in Matthew 7:3-5, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Jesus’ kind of vision clears those hypocrisies right up. And His kind of vision is the kind that sees the best in others. His vision is filtered through love. First Corinthians 13:5 tells us that real love “is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

According to verse two in that chapter, even mountain-moving faith gets us nowhere if there’s no love.

Loving according to the Lord’s example will keep us on the right track and help us to consistently see things more clearly. It’s not only better vision, it’s the best vision.

By that mountain-moving faith, I’m seeking to hang on to that kind of love vision through those weird scenes in the microwave. Getting plenty of practice. Last week somebody exploded a dozen or so pizza rolls into a forest-looking scene just before another nacho-cano. Now I can’t see the mountain for the cheese.

Rhonda Rhea is a radio personality, conference speaker, humor columnist and author of seven books, including High Heels in High Places and her newest book, Whatsoever Things Are Lovely: Must-Have Accessories for God’s Perfect Peace. You can find out more at www.RhondaRhea.org.

A Tale of Two Faces

By Rhonda Rhea –

I was looking through family pictures the other day. I love oohing and ahing over the pictures of all my kids when they were babies. I did, however, make an interesting observation in several of the shots that included the entire family. When the kids were babies, my husband had a mustache.

And I didn’t.

Woah, not a pretty turn of events, I must say. I wonder if we could make a bad reality show out of it. Something like “Where’s Their Hair Now”? Or even better, how about “Trading Faces”?

If not a reality show, at least a poem. I’ve noticed that traumatic experiences often send writers into bouts of poetry. For some of us, it’s really bad poetry. My proof:

Electrolysis or lasers?
Should I go ahead and tweeze it?
Sugars, waxes, creams or razors?
Should I heat it, blast it, freeze it?

Maybe chemicals will get it,
Gotta look at all the facts.
I can simply wax poetic,
But maybe I should simply wax.

I decided it was time to end the bad poem when I realized there were too many words that rhyme with “pelt” and not enough that rhyme with “weed-whacker.”

All “Extreme Makeover, Face Editions” aside, it’s not a bad thing to stop and think about our spiritual faces. Have you ever met a two-faced person? Have you ever been one? Behaving one way at church, showing a totally different face at home, on the job or at school?

We need to always put our best face forward, as it were. Hypocrisy is one of the Lord’s pet peeves. We’re told in 1 Peter 2:1 to stop all that nonsense. “Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind” (NIV). The New Living phrases it like this, “So get rid of all malicious behavior and deceit. Don’t just pretend to be good! Be done with hypocrisy and jealousy and backstabbing.” Anytime we find ourselves acting as pretenders or two-faced back-stabbers we need a makeover in the most extreme way. And on all our collective faces.

Jesus said in Mark 7:6, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:  ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’” (NIV).

It doesn’t even really matter who has the furriest upper lip. Whatever my lip condition, I never want it to be out of sync with my heart. I’ve given my heart to Christ. That means my lips and my mind, my motives and my actions, are all to be His too. And when we have secret places of hypocrisy in our lives, they interfere with our worship. After all, there are no secret places that are hidden from Him. He sees our hearts. Isaiah 66:3 says, “The acts of the hypocrite’s worship are as abominable to God as if they were offered to idols” (AMP).

Enough duplicity. We need to get rid of every two-faced tendency. I want to look forward to meeting Jesus face to face with great eagerness and expectation. Face to face. Not face to face to face.

Rhonda Rhea is a radio personality, conference speaker, humor columnist and author of seven books, including High Heels in High Places and her newest book, Whatsoever Things Are Lovely: Must-Have Accessories for God’s Perfect Peace. You can find out more at www.RhondaRhea.org.

The Dog Ate It

By Rhonda Rhea –

Anytime it takes me an entire half hour to write out my to-do list for the day, I know it’s a day I’m likely in for some hullabaloo. That’s what hullaba-happened yesterday. I’m not the most organized cookie on the block. The to-do list helps keep me from wasting my day flitting here and there without accomplishing the things that are most vital. So I built my list and numbered each item in order of importance. Okay, since organization is not my best thing, the list was on a napkin. But at least I made it. In a few hours I had a couple of items checked off with about a dozen more to go. Still overwhelming but I was making progress.

I figured I could make faster progress if I had coffee, so I went to whip up a pot. Here’s my to-do list tip for the day:  If you’re going to put your to-do list on a napkin, at least make sure you put something on top of it so it doesn’t float off the desk. By the time I got back with my coffee, the dog had run away with it. She was under the table in the dining room. Shredding.

The next part of the hullabaloo involved an intense chase scene. I fished most of the list out from under the table and a few pieces out from between LuLu’s molars. A half hour spent on a list that was suddenly coleslaw.

LuLu was trying to look innocent. Maybe she was even trying to help me. No to-do list means nothing to do, right? Isn’t a good shredding even better than a few checkmarks? Still, the list of all the work I was trying to accomplish at home was dog chow. The dog really did eat my homework.

It was a good reminder, though, that there are times when all those things on the to-do list need to give way to things that are most vital. It’s always a good test for me when I have deadlines up to my eyebrows and I get a call from a friend who needs a listening ear. Or even when my kids want to play a game. Am I willing to shred my own agenda when the Lord might have a different one in mind? If there’s something that will bring Him glory that’s not on my to-do list, am I willing to trade my list for His?

Colossians 3:2 says to, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (NIV). Then a few verses later, we’re given this reminder:  “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Whether in word or deed, whether on a napkin or over the phone—or even playing tiddlywinks—I want my agenda to ever and always line up with His.

Of course, we’ll have trouble playing tiddlywinks. LuLu ate them. I think she thought they were baked beans. Which I’m guessing she thought would go well with the coleslaw.

Rhonda Rhea is a radio personality, conference speaker, humor columnist and author of seven books, including High Heels in High Places and her newest book, Whatsoever Things Are Lovely: Must-Have Accessories for God’s Perfect Peace. You can find out more at www.RhondaRhea.org.

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