Eat, drink and be merry

Eat, drink and be merry

It’s often thought that the Biblical statement to eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, is a sort of recipe for debauchery and wild living. 

But when I was awake during the night, I thought that it is a recipe for enjoying the moment we have, as every moment we have is a gift from our good Creator God who loves us so much. 

Shifting the focus from self to God is such a key to achieving independence and freedom and peace. It releases me from any implication that my success or otherwise hinges on my own self-belief and instead depends on the God who can do all things. The God who invites us to put all our hope in him because he is always good and always wants the best for us. 

And my faith in this great God also depends on him gifting me with it – which he always wants to do for every one of us. All we have to do is ask. Probably more than once during our lifetime. Like the man said to Jesus, ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’

Nothing in life – my success, my healing, my wholeness – is about me and my faith but about who my faith is in. It is not about my circumstances but about who has my back.

Grandma's Recipe

So I’ve just made some devil’s food cupcakes from my Grandma’s recipe. The trouble is, when Grandma was whipping up a cake, she was literally whipping it up by hand with a wooden spoon.

A certain number of strokes. You really had to have some oomph in you in those days to bake a cake successfully. 

So the directions are sketchy at best. A couple of tablespoons of butter (oh, heaped tablespoons). Four squares of chocolate (and how big is a square, I ask?). Bake about an hour or so. Bit vague.

Well, the result is out of the oven and they look like they might pass muster with the little guys who may be tucking into them tomorrow. Whether or not they would have passed Grandma’s muster is another thing.

Sometimes directions in the Bible seem pretty sketchy, too. We look for answers there to the dilemmas that distress and absorb us. We pray fervently and would be pleased to receive an email or text from on high advising us. Or we think we would be pleased to receive such an email.

Each of our lives is made up of some identical ingredients, just like most cakes have at least one egg or some flour. But then we all vary with the rest of the mix that makes up our lives. 

God knows the plans he has for each of us. He has the recipe and though it isn’t written clearly anywhere, when we stick close and listen for that still small voice he can guide us into the right ingredients and the right ratio. 

Grandma would have expected any devil’s food cake made from her recipe to come out the same as hers. But God doesn’t expect any of us to be identical to anyone else in all of his creation. We are all unique and special and whether we look like cupcakes or layer cakes, (maybe I’m taking this analogy a tad too far here...) he loves us. 

And with that I’ll go find some sort of topping to slather on the cakes.

Falling apart

Falling apart

Up and at ‘em early this morning with a big to-do list stretching across the pad. Soured cream in the fridge needed using up, so I thought I’d quickly whip up a cake for a family I wanted to give something to. I took extra care reading the directions and even put breadcrumbs in the Bundt cake pan. I’ve had trouble extricating them before from that pan, and that was the suggestion on the recipe so I did it.

Used the right flour, large eggs, added the ingredients in the right order, beat it the required amount. Into the pre-heated oven, set the timer and hey-presto, not even 9 am and ready to tick something off the list! 

I used the baking time to settle into the prayer alcove and have some quiet time with God. Read Psalm 86, all about trusting God who is faithful. Read it again. And again in a different version, thinking of all those situations and people who are on my heart just now. Holding them before God and doing my best to trust him with the lot.

Well, then the cake was done and as I took it out I suddenly thought I needed to cool it upside down, balanced on the Worcestershire sauce bottle stuck through the hole in the middle. Only I didn’t. I shouldn’t have. That is for an angel food cake, not for a cake in a pan which has breadcrumbs on it to keep it from sticking.

Because sticking is something it certainly didn’t do. As I tipped it upside down, it shot out of the pan like a child on a water slide and broke into four or five chunks. Hot chunks. 

Now my dilemma is: do I know this family well enough to take them a cake which has experienced a catastrophic tremor? Or should I slice it and arrange the slices on a plate so nobody needs know? Whatever happens, given all the Easter eggs and birthday cake and hot cross buns around here I definitely don’t want any of it left for us to eat!

So I went for a walk. Always good to walk when you don’t know what else to do. And I thought about the recipe. It didn’t say to turn the cake upside down to cool. But I ignored that. Well, I never even looked at that part of the recipe because I’d already stored it away on the bookshelf by then. I just thought I knew what to do. I am an experienced baker. I know what I’m doing. Hah.

Life is like that. At my age, I am an experienced live-er, but one who still needs to consult the Maker’s recipe often. I think I know how God wants me to live. But irritations crop up and I find I am thinking unkind thoughts, lacking in grace and love. I need to get back into that recipe book called the Bible and be encouraged, rebuked, enlightened, reminded of the high expectations God has of me.  And be filled with the Holy Spirit again so I might just manage to achieve some of them.

If my life is to finish neatly, I need to keep reading the Bible to get the recipe right, or I will fall apart like my cake did this morning.