box o' wonder

i just tonight re-realized how much of my life depends upon our microwave.  if that's not scary enough for this Halloween night, then i don't know what is.  i will never cease to be amazed at how there even IS such a thing as a microwave to be had.  and how life-sustaining a thing it turned out to be.  goodness knows i wouldn't have had at least half my meals in college if i couldn't cook pasta in 4.5 minutes.  if you keep the spaghetti sauce in the fridge, then you can throw a spoonful on top and cool down the boiling pasta as well as warm up the sauce to a great eat-able temperature at once.   hot chocolate-to-go in 1.8 minutes.  stale bread brought back to life in 7 seconds.  a box of wonder, that's what a microwave is!!  ours picked up a second language in its spare time- what a show-off!  "disfrutas sus alimentos"- whatever!!  that ain't no delectable home-cooked 3 course dinner straight off the stove.  sorry.  becoming the perfect hostess with mad cooking skills is somewhere on my bucket list, but as long as it's just me, eating lunch at 1 am i don't feel any guilt at all by letting a giant bilingual box do all the hard work. 

i take so much for granted that it's a bit humbling just thinking about it, and i don't just mean kitchen appliances.  while i don't have a sweet tooth and i never went trick-or-treating, underneath all the whoop-de-do there's a huge deal to be made about the real holiday- Reformation Day.  it's hard to imagine a whole world (as they knew it, anyway) where nobody knew how to read and the poor just lived from day to day trying to keep their homes stable.  any thought of the afterlife was planted by church leaders that were trusted but generally corrupted, greedy, conniving humans who saw this dreary situation as a perfect business opportunity.  then came Luther (and a good many others).  one man saw a problem and a solution and then said something about it.  he found a miracle hidden in a previously commonplace item, too- one that's a bit bigger than modern conveniences.  i remember the difference i felt, the thrill, in reading the Bible before, and then after i met the same struggle with grace that Luther fought, too.  i simply cannot imagine what was going through the minds of those peasants all those years ago who for the first time held a copy of Romans in their hands and read it for themselves.   and then realized that all those indulgences they paid for were worth more as kindling in the kitchen fire than as any type of eternal consolation.  i wish i could'a been there- even if it meant cooking over flame (they didn't have microwaves, you see).  but i wasn't there then.  i'm here now: glad for another day, another year, to live (really LIVE), read a book, hug a kid, check a patient's pulses,  find a miracle and eat 3 1/2 minute spaghetti and hot chocolate for lunch at 1 am.