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Upon arriving here, I was excited to start posting on this blog. Well, it turned out that my computer still had problems after I thought I had taken care of them on the mainland ...
No worries! I have great neighbors who are experts and were more than happy to help. Now, hopefully, I will be able to post every day!
Yesterday, I asked my readers a question. Today, I would like to give everyone some food for thought based on that question. I have this super cool book which initially, I was skeptical about.
Every time I saw it at the book store, I would take one glance at it and think to myself, "what a cheesy title" (I was still in "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" mode) until one day, I noticed the book was written by one of my favorite authors: Dr. Henry Cloud. I had to have it! The ideas shared in the first few chapters were new to me and a bit shocking, but I continued to read and as I finished the last chapter, everything made perfect sense! Every single adult should own one of these "handbooks"... makes this "season" in life so much easier! It is this excerpt from the book which I have been wanting to share:
- Are you content with your life? If not, then it is not time for marriage. Marriage or a significant relationship is about two healthy, content people coming together, and the "two becoming one." If they are not "whole" people, you don't have two becoming one. You have a half of a person joining another half of a person, hoping to find wholeness. Remember that one half times one half equals one forth. You will end up worse than when you started if you do not get a whole life first.
- Are you seeking a relationship to end loneliness? If you are, it won't. Cure your loneliness first. You must have a full heart to bring to a relationship, not an empty one. Get your relational needs met with a good community of friends. Otherwise, you are going to choose a mate out of dependency and need. If you do that, your judgement is going to be clouded by your needs, and you are more likely to choose badly.
- What are you expecting marriage to provide for you? If you think that it will make you happy when you are not, you are wrong. Unhappy people who get married create unhappy marriages. If you think it will cure your depression or emptiness, it won't. Depression and emptiness are conditions that need counseling, therapy, and spiritual growth. Work on those first, and then worry about getting married. Marriage will only complicate those issues. My advice is the same for things such as desire for security, fear, bad feelings about yourself, and feeling unloved. Work on those things first, then worry about marriage when you no longer need marriage to make up for those things.
So now, I would like to share some of our tropical adventures...
Angelina and I went on a little walk through the "rain forest" and found bananas, three HUGE yellow pomelos, and the best mature coconut I have ever tried! We also found good sized guava (yellow on the outside, pink inside) and wild mandarins that we ate on our walk.
I climbed a coconut tree (without any equipment) for the first time today. The tree trunk was a bit slippery and it was windy, making it very dangerous. I wasn't able to get any coconuts off the tree ... I could have fallen off of it if I had stayed up too long. Instead, we just took one off the ground and it turned out to be the most delicious coconut I have ever tried!!! Ever. Sweet, juicy and very thick meat. The tool you see in the photo is used to make a hole in young coconuts, making it easy to pour out and drink the juice. We had a papaya for lunch and the seeds from it are drying on the windowsill, they will be ground and used as pepper. The fruit in the black bowl is a Noni fruit and was my dessert. We picked some several days ago on another one of our hikes and even though they were yellow and looked ripe when we picked them, they were as hard as rocks. I discovered that throwing and bruising the Noni makes them soft within hours. We also left the one above to ripen and it was soft within days. To me, the taste wasn't as terrible as people describe it. The Noni fruit has hints of pear and pineapple with a very dominant cheese smell. I've gotten used to the taste and smell, eating two big Noni fruit in one sitting ... couldn't eat too much though, Noni stung worse than pineapple and numbed my tongue. Hawaii is definitely Noni Land!
I discovered a random jackfruit tree growing on one of my hikes and these are two jackfruit that I picked (about 25 pounds each), set out in the sun and awaiting to ripen. I was so excited to find some jackfruit, I didn't even realize they weren't fully ripe. This will be my first time trying FRESH jackfruit, the times I did have it were back on the mainland, found in the frozen section of an Asian market.
Just a "green" reminder: Whenever possible, use the wind and sun to dry your clothes
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