About a week and a half ago, Hannah tried her hand at making mozzarella cheese--and it turned out really well!
Our making of cheese from our goat milk made an article I read a couple days ago more pertinent. It was talking about how the story of David and Goliath really started, not with David's bravado, but with cheese.
"I feel like we have done David and Goliath a slight disservice by leaving out one extremely important detail when we tell this story--" the author wrote, "--the cheese."
It said how David did not wake up that morning and think, “Seems like a good day to fight a giant.” He was tending his father’s sheep when his father interrupted his day by asking him to do a grocery delivery, including taking ten cheeses to the captain of the army. David simply did what his father asked him to do.
He took the cheese.
I don't know if it was a hunk of soft goat cheese like I normally make, or if it was mozzarella cheese, or just hunks of curds like cottage cheese, whatever they made in those days. But David set off, doing the thing his father had asked him to do.
Upon arriving at the battlefield, David discovered the giant--and the cheeses he had delivered were quite forgotten.
"Imagine spending forty days challenging an entire army," the author wrote of the giant, "and eventually somebody says, 'Fine. We found someone,' and out walks the teenager who arrived earlier with the cheese."
David didn't know the rest of the story when he left home that morning, the article said. As far as he knew, he was just delivering cheese.
"We spend so much time looking for the enormous thing God wants us to do that sometimes we underestimate the ordinary thing He has already put in front of us. We want the calling written across the sky. We want God to explain where this road is going before we agree to walk it. We want to know why we are at this job, why we met this person, why plans changed, why we are being asked to do something that seems completely insignificant, and how any of it could possibly matter.
Meanwhile, sometimes God just says, take the cheese."
God wants us to "do the ordinary thing in front of you. Be faithful where you are. Show up. Take care of what He has already given you. You may have absolutely no idea what God is positioning you for while you are doing it."
"David didn't leave home looking for Goliath. He left home carrying ten cheeses. The giant was waiting at the end of an ordinary act of obedience."
"Maybe that is something we need to remember when life feels painfully ordinary. You do not have to see the battlefield from where you are standing" or "understand why this particular assignment matters. You do not have to know what God is doing three steps from now.
You just have to be faithful with the step He put in front of you. Sometimes that step looks like facing a giant. And sometimes it looks like carrying the cheese."
For me, it looks like making the cheese, about three times a week, even on a Saturday afternoon or a Monday morning like today.
But it's a blessing to have it, such as today when goat cheese was one thing I could eat with cucumber since my mouth ulcers are so bad I couldn't bear to eat much of anything.
I could make cheese, eat cheese, and share cheese with our friends who stop by weekly for milk. I shared milk and goat cheese, and they shared beets and onions from their garden.
No giants today, just ordinary cheese!
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