The Best Pie Ever

A couple of weeks ago, The Farmer's family got together to celebrate Easter.  It was a great evening of catching up with family and eating a lot of delicious food.  One of his aunts had made a pie that both The Farmer and I ate and LOVED.  His aunt gave me the recipe, and it sounded pretty simple, so I decided to whip one up the other day.  It was delicious, and so easy to make!  

Are you ready for the easiest, tastiest recipe ever?  Here it is:

Creamy Peanut Butter Pie

1 cup peanut butter (we prefer creamy but crunchy would be fine too, if you're into that)

1 cup powdered sugar

1 8oz block cream cheese, softened

1 12oz tub Cool Whip

1 Oreo pie crust

To make the pie, mix the peanut butter and powdered sugar well.  Add the softened cream cheese and mix well.  (I used a Kitchen Aid mixer for all of this.)  Then gently fold in the tub of Cool Whip with a spatula.  Once the mixture is all folded together, pour it into the Oreo crust and refrigerate.  How easy is that?!

In other news, Harlee had to take a bath last night.  Since we've moved to the farm, she has picked up a nasty habit of finding dead animals and rolling herself on them.  Apparently this is appealing to her?  Dogs are weird.  Anyways, Harlee is terrified of getting a bath.  She cowers in the corner of the shower, tucks her tail completely between her hind legs, and shakes.  She doesn't stop shaking until she's out of the bath and getting dried off.  

The first couple of times I bathed her, I felt bad for her.  I was still a relatively new figure in her life, and she didn't have any history with me to know that I was not going to hurt her.  That was over two years ago.  As I was bathing her last night, and she was shaking as violently as ever, I was thinking about how silly she is.  She knows me now; she knows I would never do anything to hurt her.  She knows that I make sure she has food, water, shelter, love, etc. every single day.  She knows that in our entire 2+ years of being together, I have never done anything to hurt her.  Yet she's still terrified when I bathe her.

It's easy for me to laugh at her, but then I realize that I do the same thing.  I have a long history with God.  I've been in church since before I was born, I asked Jesus into my heart when I was 3 years old, and my entire life has been a journey with the Lord.  Through all of that, over the last 30 years of life, He has never once let me down, left me hanging, or let something happen to me that wasn't for my good.  Sure, He's let me go through some difficult things: a very difficult breakup, a scary car accident, and two months of being violently ill in the Amazon jungle come to mind, but those are stories for another day.  Looking back on each of those events, I can see his grace and protection in each one.  I know that all 3 turned out for His glory and my good.  But along comes a new challenge, and my reaction is to freak out, tuck my tail between my legs, and shake like Harlee.

I want Harlee to calm down enough to just stand there while I bathe her, but much more importantly, I want to calm down and rest in His goodness while He takes me through the things that I don't enjoy.  Isaiah 30:15 says that “In repentance and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength.”  I want to stop standing in the corner shaking and just wait in quiet trust.  

God is so good, to use even the mundane tasks like bathing the dog to teach me.  If anyone has practical ideas about how to be a quiet truster (not a word?) instead of a corner shaker, I'd love to hear them.  In the meantime, I'll be over here bathing my dog.  Because now that she's all clean, her mission for tomorrow will be to find a new rotting carcass to roll in.