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.