The Recipe of Life

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:20:25 -0400

We all go through things in life. Some good. Some bad. Many are somewhere in between. For most of us, our childhood is a mixed bag of memories. There were the good times when we played until dark without a care in the world, but then there were the bad times when we were teased, bullied, called names, or excluded by our school mates.

For many, the teen years were the worst, that time in life when hormones and brain cells were not maturing at the same rate! Maybe you were a fighter, defending your territory on a daily basis, or maybe you were rejected by the cool kids. You may have disrespected your parents and teachers because you thought you knew more than anyone else. Or maybe you were convinced no one on earth understood you, and you were in a mental and emotional funk most of the time.

It would be nice if the trauma of life ended when we reached adulthood, but for many it was only the beginning of our trouble. You may have met the love of your life, but after you ran down the aisle to say, "I do", reality set in, and you discovered you were still lonely, discouraged, and angry. Somehow, life just didn't seem to work out for you.

As life continued, you may have thought, "Why me? Why does everything happen to me?" Problems may have stacked one upon another - health issues, financial set-backs, family tension, and job loss - one building block of frustration on top of another until you feared you might lose it all in one big heap of rubble.

The truth is, there's no reason to ask, "Why me?", because for most of the world, this is just life. There are ups and downs, ebbs and flows, mountain tops and valleys of the shadow of death. There are no perfect lives, even in the Christian world.

I believe walking through our lives is like baking a cake. You go to the kitchen, and you pull out a recipe card. You grab the flour and sugar from the pantry, the vanilla, salt, and baking soda from the cupboard, and the butter, eggs, and sour cream from the refrigerator. You check your list, and you have to send your husband to the store for the most important ingredient, the bittersweet chocolate!

You blend everything together, beat it a little bit, spread it in a pan, and allow it to spend time in a hot oven. The result is a yummy chocolate cake for dessert that you can be proud of. But what if you decided to skip a few steps, and you served all of your ingredients individually instead of blending them together? It would taste horrible, even the chocolate.

This sounds a lot like life to me. Just as the ingredients of a cake are not meant to be served alone, our lives are not meant to be judged by individual events. If we take the separate issues of our lives, and we try to judge our success based on each one apart from the others, our lives will seem like utter failures.

We have to allow our daily issues to be combined with others over a lifetime. We have to allow for the blending process, a little beating, the pressure of being fitted into a form, and the heat of a blazing fire. When we allow for all of this, we will come out transformed, complete, and beautiful.

Romans 8:28 says: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose." Just like the cake batter, our separated circumstances don't make much sense, but mixed together by God, they create a beautiful thing.

If you will allow God, the Master Baker, to take your life as it is, a set of ingredients that seem to make no sense apart from one another, and if you will allow Him to put His hand to work, your life will fulfill a purpose, and your future will be more than you ever dreamed it could be.

But what about all the blending, and the beating, and the forming, and the time spent in the fire? It's called being molded into the image of Christ.

The blending process is a lot like getting your mind renewed by the Word of God. It may seem like you are out of control, swirling around in the bowl, but stay the course, reading the Word day after day after day, and eventually things will get better.

Then comes the beating, not like a whipping from your childhood, but a simple correction, call chastisement in the Bible, where God uses His Word to set you straight and to convict you to go in the right direction. This might happen daily, or maybe even every hour on the hour. Just let it happen until you catch on and begin to live uprightly.

Then comes the forming. We are all in need of some time on the potter's wheel, allowing God to smooth off our rough edges, and in the case of baking, to shake us up a bit until the air pockets are gone. There's nothing wrong with being shaken when the purpose is to come out like Christ in the end.

Finally, there's the fire. No one likes it when life heats up, but this is what it takes to finish the dessert called your life. Heat transforms, and that's what God desires to do for you.

Don't you want to be more than the mere some of your parts? Don't you want God's best for your life? I do, and I also want the frosting after the cool down! That's when God comforts us, and then He serves us up to the world as a gift and a treasure.

I believe if you will begin to look at your life like a recipe, and most importantly if you will put your "ingredients" in the hands of our Mighty God, you will come out better, stronger, and more confident than you have ever been.

When you feel discouraged, or when you've been knocked down in life, don't ever count yourself out. Get back up, put God in the center of the situation, and let Him work all things together for your good!