Yesterday Haylee, six, asked to make some sugar cookies. Being the doting grama that I am, I waddled out to the kitchen to find a recipe. Haylee pulled up a stool to the counter. Soon Kinsey, four, decided to “help” make cookies, too, and dragged a stool of her own to the counter. They were so close to me, I couldn’t get the mixer out of the cupboard. After some adjustments, collecting untensils, and gathering ingredients, we set about making our confectionary delights.
Haylee got to measure 2 and 3/4 cups flour into a bowl. Then I showed her how to level off a half-teaspoon of baking powder, and a teaspoon of baking soda. She dumped that into the flour and I gave her a wire wisk to stir it together. Meanwhile Kinsey wanted to do something, so I let her mix up the sugar, butter, egg, and vanilla flavoring. When her arm got tired of holding the mixer, I took over and helped. Then once the two girls had sufficiently mixed ingredients in their separate bowls, I let Haylee add the flour mixture to the creamed butter mixture as I stirred them together. After we’d finished, we all went over to my kitchen table to spoon dabs of dough onto cookie sheets. I gave each girl a spoon, and…
Here’s where it got a bit bumpy. When you turn loose of control, there it no telling what you’re going to get. Kinsey plopped her dabs of dough all over the place….no rhyme or reason–empty spot, drop a dab; if it touched the last dab, “It will be otay.” Haylee was a bit more methodical; she tried to keep her dollops all in a row. Even though they watched me scoop up a spoonful and gently push it onto the pan, they just couldn’t get the hang of a consistent size scoop. They were adorable. And they felt so helpful. They loved doing what they were doing–so enthusiastic.
After they’d tired of spooning out dough onto the cookie sheets, they took their dough-smeared spoons and fingers and headed in the living-room to watch a Pink Panther cartoon.
As I added to their tiny dollops and removed a bit of dough from their larger dollops, I thought how God does this to us. We make every effort to follow instructions and do what His Word tells us to do. We even imitate our Lord and show kindness and mercy and forgiveness every chance we get. But we, like my granddaughters, do not always get everything just right. Some dollops had too much dough, others had too little. Some were too close together and other too far apart. I had to correct the imbalances so that when I put them in the oven, they’d all cook at the same pace and come out of the oven just right. I set the timer and with one batch I had to leave it in a bit longer; the second batch the oven got too hot and I had to turn it down. The third batch was just perfect.
God wants perfection. He settles for nothing less. What we try to do in life does not meet perfection. Only through Christ are we able to accomplish anything. As Christians God is working out all things according to His purposes, for His glory, for His good. The ultimate good. Throughout Biblical history God has been working with His creation to reconcile the imbalance created by one single act of disobedience. God has paid the penalty for all of mankind’s sin through the shedding of His only begotten Son’s blood. And as we go about our lives trying to show the world how great God is, God takes our dollops and dabs and adds to or subtracts from them. He spaces them out with His perfect timing and revels in the joy of working with us as we seek to bake cookies for the King.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
As we go about our lives, fretting and fuming that someone is not doing their jobs right, or someone is failing to pull their load, we might do well to remember that God is in control of it all. And if one dollop is getting too much dough, God will lighten its load and give it to another so all things work out just perfectly, according to His plan and purpose. selahV today