A New Way to Shell Peas (For Us)

We were blessed a couple of weeks ago by a gentleman at church.  He gave us a pea sheller that he was no longer using.  For years we've been shelling peas by hand.  I love shelling peas.  It is a relaxing, therapeutic endeavor that is guaranteed to reduce your blood pressure and pulse rate.  I don't know what it is about sitting down with a bushel of peas and a big bowl and shelling, but it puts you in a good frame of mind.  

Our new pea sheller is electric.  It is fast.  You turn it on and put the pea pod into the mouth of the machine.  The pod is pulled through two rubber rollers.  One roller is on a spring.  As the pulley turns the rollers and the pod is sucked through, the peas are popped out into a tray below and the empty shells are thrust into a separate tray.

I'm trying to figure out which tray your fingers go into if you aren't careful!  If I get careless and lose a a couple of digits, I want to make sure Tricia knows which tray to retrieve my fingers so she can sew them back on.  I kid, I kid.

Depending on the size of your peas, you can loosen the wing nuts and adjust the opening.  That's the safety device that keeps you from losing a finger or two.

Here's the empty pods being pushed through.  We'll put these into the compost pile.

And here are the results of our first experiment with our newfangled, super duty, Cummins diesel-powered, turbo-charged pea sheller.  (I may have embellished that description a bit.)  You can see the results look pretty decent.  

As I look over the shelled peas, I can pick out several different varieties: black-eyed peas, purple hulled peas, Ozark razorback peas, and whippoorwill peas.  That is a nice diversity of pea varieties, but it ushered in a problem.  I learned that you can only feed one variety in at a time.  They must be sorted by size and the rollers of the pea sheller must be adjusted for each variety.  This is done with a screwdriver.

If you don't do this, you'll either squash your bigger-sized peas like black-eyes and purple hulls OR the smaller peas like Ozark razorback and whippoorwills will pass right through and not be ejected by the rollers.  As with anything new, you learn from your mistakes.  Tricia put on a pot of white rice and cooked the peas with some smoked sausage and onions and the first peas shelled in our pea sheller have already been consumed.

With the test done, we're now prepared.  If we still have electricity, the new pea sheller will come in mighty handy.  If we lose power, the old, manual pea sheller (our hands) will get the job done as well!

A New Creature

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.  2 Corinthians 5:17

I was walking outside last weekend trying to relax.  Work has been on the stressful side lately.  To add to that, the happenings in our country, on both the social front and politically front, are hard to digest.  There have always been disagreements between people from the beginning of time.  The best I can figure, we progressed at some point and got civilized.  Civilization brought with it, the ability to agree to disagree, without duels or shoot-outs.  The classic liberal quote, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it" seems to be lost on us these days.

However, there is still peace out there if you know where to look.  I go outside and look at the Creator's creation.  God can minister to you there, if you listen.  I happened to come upon a neat thing.  We call them locusts, but most other people call them cicadas.  These are big insects that come out of the ground and undergo a metamorphosis.  You can see a brilliant green winged creature emerging from an ugly brown 'shell.'

The winged creature hangs from the shell of the old body that it shed and dries his wings.

The old body it has left behind is just a shell, a temporary dwelling place for the creature that is now moving on to bigger and better things.  The empty body will eventually return to the dust of whence it came.

The winged locust sets his sights now on higher things.  It leaves the old creature behind and focuses above.  He'll fly to the top of the nearest tree and sing.  Loudly.  

What a beautiful illustration of the Christian life.  Once we come to trust Him, we are new creatures.  The old things have passed away.  We were bought with a price by the blood of Jesus.  We are no longer relegated to an old, ordinary life, but a new, extraordinary one.  We will want to serve Him and serve others.  Like the locust, we sing!  We focus on things above, on things holy and pure.  Righteous and just, true and commendable and we sing praises to His Name.  Amen.