All of my favorite things came together for May’s Book + Recipe. Banana bread, doughnuts, a good book and a collaboration with my insanely talented best friend who happens to be the owner of Laura Ann Photography. If you haven’t already, check out her Facebook page here. I don’t have any crazy stories for you this month; no sugar detoxes or offering to make dessert for all of the church volunteers on Easter Sunday. Truthfully, I’m trying to navigate these books a little slower so I can process all of the words and actually apply them to my life. While I read them, there are a lot of “oh, that’s so me” moments or “I thought I was the only one who struggles with that” moments, but there are also a lot of moments in between when conviction quietly slips in and I know there is something that I need to change in my heart. More to come on that, though, because for now, I”d rather talk about doughnuts and intimacy. If that doesn’t convince you to keep reading, then really, I don’t know what will.
The Recipe
Two of my guilty pleasures joined undeniable forces in this month’s recipe: banana bread + doughnuts. I’ve never made doughnuts before, but I have an unwavering appreciation and enthusiasm for doughnut shops and bakeries so I finally gave in and bought my own doughnut pan since I have about 25 doughnut recipes on my “to-make” list. I’ve been putting it off because we have this little thing at my job called “Doughnut Friday” and it’s hard to justify eating doughnuts more than once a week—although I’m open to hearing any justifications, excuses or contrary arguments that you have to offer me. But these Banana Bread Doughnuts with Browned Butter Glaze had me at “healthier than fried doughnuts.” How’s that for justification?
The recipe calls for simple ingredients that you likely have on hand. I made the mistake of using salted butter for the glaze and it changed the flavor drastically. For the second batch, I omitted the glaze and threw in a handful a bag of chocolate chips in the batter. That was a winning decision on my part. As much as I liked these, I decided I’d rather have actual banana bread. And as much as I liked these, I decided I’d rather indulge in deep fried dough and frosting than healthy-ish doughnuts. But if you’re trying to watch your calories but can’t quite give up your doughnut fix, these baked doughnuts are the solution.
The Book
I stumbled upon Donald Miller while I was shamelessly stalking Bob Goff. If you don’t know who Bob Goff is, picture the old man from the movie “Up” who wrote a book about how to love people well. Anyway, while researching Bob, I found Donald Miller who wrote the book “Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy.” His life and words have been heavily influenced by Bob who actually wrote the foreword of the book.
Scary Close is a personal account of Donald’s failed relationships, which he blames on his inability to intimately connect with people. The book is about his realization that he’s been putting in so much effort in creating a persona that people would like, that he couldn’t develop connections with anyone or have meaningful relationships. He admits that he was so focused on impressing people, that any glimpse of authenticity or connection was pretty much non-existent in his life. Donald points out that if we don’t offer people our true selves, our relationships will suffer. If our relationships suffer, we suffer. And since we’re built for relationship, we cheat ourselves out of the best that life has to offer when we deny ourselves the human experience of doing life with other people.
Donald discovers that there’s a freedom to be found when we stop acting and start loving. He leaves us with a question that we should all really answer…who could we be if we stopped pretending? How could we love better if we were willing to reveal our true messy selves? Are we willing to impress fewer people to genuinely connect with more? Ultimately, if we truly want to connect with people at our most authentic level, we won’t impress them. We must sacrifice one to gain the other.
The entire two weeks that I spent reading Scary Close was kind of like having multiple conversations with that one uncle of yours that hasn’t quite grown up yet and brings a new girlfriend every year at Christmas. Donald Miller is absurdly realistic and candid, and offers a male perspective when it comes to the struggles of intimacy or developing close relationships with the people he loves. While I truly believe that women (in general) are better at this whole intimacy thing, with the social media epidemic, I really feel that we’re all kind of cheating ourselves out of intimacy. This book is a guiding light through the process of how to step out from behind the curtain and into the spotlight of realness and wholeness.
P.S. This miiiiight be a good book to casually leave on the coffee table if you feel like your boyfriend or husband denies his emotions or buries his feelings.
Quotes I Journaled From This Book
“But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing.”
“God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he’s going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.”
“The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.”
“Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.”
“I don’t trust people to accept who I am in process. I’m the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world—so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.”
“I’d have to trust that my flaws were the ways through which I would receive grace. We don’t think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.”
“I LIKE WHAT THE DANCER MARTHA GRAHAM ONCE said, that each of us is unique and if we didn’t exist something in the world would have been lost. I wonder, then, why we are so quick to conform—and what the world has lost because we have.”