What's Life Baking Up?
This isn't a photo of my buns. 😉 Every time I go to take a photo, the ones I baked have been eaten!
Over Christmas I decided to make homemade yeast cinnamon buns and boy were they a hit. Unfortunately, this recipe, which takes hours, is my husband's new favorite. The process includes mixing, two separate lengthy rising processes, baking and making the icing. Sunday he politely let me know he had devoured his final cinnamon bun. Monday morning I pulled out some of the ingredients, but life was baking up a lot of other needs and it was 6:30 PM when I looked at the yeast packets, bag of bread flour and him and said, "I am so sorry, I just don't have it in me to start this process at this time."
How surprised was I to awaken the next morning to a devotional by Lysa Terkeurst titled "Glimpses of Joy." She bases her devotional on James 1:2-3 and expressed that it's best to learn to trust that God knows what he is doing picking and choosing what ingredients are part of our stories. God has purpose in all his plans.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
Lysa uses the baking process as an example of how we can trust in God's plans.
"After going to the store, we set out all the ingredients: the flour, the butter, the sugar, the vanilla, the eggs, the baking powder, and a pinch of salt. But then maybe we felt too tired to mix it all together and make the cake. Instead, we thought we could just enjoy the cake one ingredient at a time. The thing is that sometimes we don’t like some of the individual ingredients, so we’d rather leave them out.
The flour is too dry — leave it out.
The sugar, butter and vanilla are all good — leave them in!
The eggs are just gross when raw — definitely leave those out!
And then our cake would never be made mature and complete, not lacking anything.
We are so quick to judge the quality of our lives and the reliability of God based on individual events, rather than the eventual good God is working together.
We must know that just like the master baker has reasons to allow the flour and eggs in right measure into the recipe, Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), will do the same with dry times and hard times. And yes, we may have to go through some chaos in the mixing and some heat in the baking, but soon we will rise and live lives that are a sweet offering of hope, grace, peace and comfort to others."
Having a husband who enjoys something baked fresh from the oven, I relate to this analogy. Just the other day I baked an apple pie, but forgot to add the cornstarch and had a soggy bottom crust. It was a reminder of the importance of every ingredient God places in our lives. Especially His Word.
We are in the midst of a snow/ice storm right now. Besides downed trees, loss of power is a concern. We have a lot of Homestead Creamery ice cream in our freezer! Praise the Lord we never lose his power, so if he is baking up some other plans for us today, let's accept those and praise his holy name, knowing he will give us the power to see through, what he has planned for our growth and his glory.
Yesterday's driving instructions are not for ice. Stay home!
The Song (So, much fun.)
"Good Day"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMVOQUuILc
