If You Give a Blogger a Cookie...

 

“For the Lord promotes justice, and never abandons his faithful followers. They are permanently secure, but the children of the wicked are wiped out.”  Psalm 37:28

 Have you ever made cookies? It’s a process. First you put in the softened butter and you turn on the mixer to beat it, a lot. You beat it and beat it until it is “creamed”. If you were the butter, you wouldn’t think very well of this! But then you add in the sugar. That’s sweet! But wait! Then comes the beating again! When you finish this part though, the butter and sugar have come together in a wonderful cohesiveness. It was brutal, but the results are smooth and sparkly and sweet, but not quite cookies yet! Next, someone comes along and lays an egg on it. Eww. Have you ever just had a load of icky, gooey gunk dropped in your life? You know, like a lay off, or a chronic illness, or a broken relationship. Just yuck. Or at least it seems that way, but it has a purpose! Yet again, the mixture is beaten, incorporating everything together, and this time it’s not quite so sweet and pretty, and you’re not supposed to eat it now, but you know I never listen to that! Meanwhile, in another bowl, you’ve been adding the dry ingredients: flour, baking soda and/or powder, salt (because even sweet things need a little saltiness!). If you’re making spicy cookies, you’ll throw in some cinnamon, nutmeg, or ginger. If you’re making chocolate cookies (and why wouldn’t you be?) you’ll add in some cocoa powder. But here’s the kicker, don’t taste the cocoa powder! Or the cinnamon for that matter 😕. You see, while these ingredients add flavor to our life, they aren’t very good on their own. I love chocolate, but cocoa powder without the fat and sugar (and maybe dairy) is nasty. Once all the dry ingredients are tossed together, they get added into the mixer and guess what, you beat it again! This time, though, if you add all the dry ingredients at once you’ll end up with a dust storm in the kitchen! Instead, it is recommended to add in the dry ingredients a little at a time, beating in between additions, so this doesn’t happen. Finally you scoop the doughy goodness out into heaps on a cookie sheet and, you guessed it, slide it into a fiery furnace (aka an oven).

 If you skip any of these steps, your cookies will not turn out. Each process, each individual ingredient, has a purpose, even if they are not delicious on their own. In fact, if you ate a spoonful of any of these ingredients, you would not think, “Oh! This is a fabulous cookie!” Actually, it would probably get spit out. Even the sugar, the sweetness, by itself is not tasty. If you tossed all the ingredients into a bowl at once and tried to stir it together, they wouldn’t come together well. You’d get chunks of butter, pockets of flour, and it definitely wouldn’t be cohesive. Each step in the process has its purpose.

 So, again, I encourage you to shift your perspective. Think of this process from the perspective of the bowl. Each ingredient added in could be a life experience, some satisfying like butter, some sweet like sugar, some salty or bitter. Each time an ingredient, or experience, gets added, it has to be processed, beaten around, incorporated into the whole. If you were the bowl, this probably wouldn’t feel good. But it’s so important in bringing the recipe, or the life, together! If you were the dough, heading into the oven wouldn’t seem like a very good idea. In fact, you’d probably avoid it if you could, but you can’t, you’re dough, you just have to experience what you’re presented with.

 The question arises, how do we keep this perspective? How do we remember that the season we are in is just that, a season, and it will not last forever? How do we remember that God is the baker and He is bringing all the ingredients together in the perfect process to create the most mouth-watering cookie of a life you could imagine? How do we humble ourselves and become dough, submitting to the fiery furnace of trial, knowing that it is necessary to activate the chemical reactions of all the different ingredients that have come together so that we can transform from a sticky, gooey (delicious!), mess into a soft, warm, tasty cookie? The answer is simple, we have to trust the Baker. We have to trust that even though the nutmeg tastes gross, it will match up with the ginger and the cinnamon for a perfect flavor palette. We have to stop thinking we are the Baker, because we’re not! We don’t actually know better. Yes, we have opinions about what gets tossed into the bowl, but they are “little o” opinions as my Mom puts it. All they really do is affect our experience, they don’t change the situation. God’s not going to say, “Oh, you’re right! What was I thinking putting salt in a cookie? Here, I’ll take that out right now!” The only thing our opinions change is how we look at the situation. We might say, “Salt is great, but I really don’t think it belongs here,” and grumble at God for adding it into our experience. Or we could say, “I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I trust that You know best and you’re putting together the recipe of my life perfectly! I’ll accept the salt and do what I can to work with You as You incorporate it into my life.”

 Unlike dough, however, we do have choices in this process. We can resist God, or even go a different way. We can toss out the egg, thinking we know better and we don’t need it. We can even take the egg and throw it into someone else’s bowl just to be mean. In today’s verse, we see how God does not abandon His followers. He is putting things together in our life for our good, according to His plan and purpose. But those that resist Him, those who turn their back and go the other way toward wickedness, they are wiped out. Not just them, but their children too!

Here’s the Thing: Even when circumstances in life are not good, we can trust that God is. In fact, that’s so often what we have to fall back on and trust in when everything seems sour or salty and gooey and gross around us.