Sausage Making

 Back in the old country, every year around the time fall turned into winter, and the first snow blanketed the ground, my grandmother used to make sausage. It wasn’t so much for tradition but rather for survival. If you didn’t prepare judiciously, chances were you’d be scrambling for food before spring came around. Before the roads became impassable, your cellar should have already been full of root vegetables, potatoes, and jarred goods, and your larder packed with pickled fish, larded meats, salted cheeses, and, yes, smoked sausage.

It was my dad and grandpa’s job to butcher the animals, and it was my grandmother’s to combine the meats and the spices and ground them by hand.

Everyone worked and contributed, but as far back as I can remember, I had the worst job of all. I wouldn’t have minded cranking the grinder; I wouldn’t have even minded butchering the animals if I’d had the knowledge or the upper body strength. Unfortunately, I never got a choice in the matter, and every year my job was to blow air into the sheep intestines my grandmother used for the casing. Yes, they were washed, and although there was still a little something to tweak the olfactory senses, it was the touching of the gut to my lips that always got to me. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to pucker up to cold sheep intestines, but it’s not like kissing in movies, or real life, for that matter.

I know I’m grossing you out. How exactly do you think sausage is made? Perhaps not the big boys like Jimmy Dean or Vienna Beef, but if you’re having homemade sausage with natural casing at someone’s house, know somebody had to blow air through the sheep gut before they rolled it onto the meat spigot. Don’t bother trying to name your edgy Christian band Meat Spigot. I’ve already copyrighted the name.

By the same token, everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to know what it takes to get there. Don’t tell me how the sausage is made; just put it on my plate and be done with it.

The only problem is that, in this case, your participation is mandatory. There’s no fast pass to heaven. Sorry to break it to you! Yes, I know the graduates of the Creflo Dollar school of ministry are indignant at the thought. How dare you speak of anything other than prosperity? All this back and forth about righteousness and holiness is taking away from the true message: money! All those people getting martyred, slaughtered, and carrying their crosses are doing it out of ignorance. When they tap into the secret sauce and broaden their horizons and break out of the constraints of what is written in the Word, they can start cooking with gasoline.

You can start manifesting, putting together some vision boards, speaking mansions into life, naming, claiming, you know, the good stuff. No more of this picking up your cross and following after Jesus, no sir; it’s time you lived your best life now!

Since such individuals never had much use for the Bible anyway, you can’t make a counterargument based on scripture, leaving little wiggle room for agreement. Imagine if they’d run across Paul the Apostle before he penned all those epistles. They would have taught him a thing or two!

Understand that within the primary church, there was no talk of pre-tribulation rapture or any such thing because they knew the difference between tribulation and persecution. Their faith was immutable regarding God’s ability to protect, preserve, and provide.

They were being persecuted by the Romans and the Pharisees alike, and everyone knew someone that had been martyred for the cause of Christ. The notion of suffering was not anathema. The idea of suffering was an accepted fact, an eventuality for which the only variance was timing. They knew that sooner or later, it would be a certainty, and they walked into that future with heads held high and eyes wide open.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.