Published by I invited you for dinner at my house for 6pm, promising you a great meal. You are excited about this because you love food – in fact, you refuse to eat your wife’s food throughout the day because you are reserving your appetite for dinner. You start getting dressed at 4pm. By 5pm you set out for the 15 minute journey to my house, arrive at 5.20pm, walk around the compound for a few minutes (so you won’t look too much like a lover of food). You come into the house at 5.45pm with the excuse that you came early so you could help me with some of the cooking. I politely thank you and inform you that the food is all ready.
Everything does feel ready! You smell vanilla (hmmmm); everything smells sweet and is well covered on the table. (By the way, you brought along an opener just in case we need something to open the drinks with). At 5 minutes past 6, I invite you to the table, and ask you to bless the meal. There’s some soft jazz music playing in the background, and it feels exactly like God has set a table before you… in the presence of your friend! First of all, you thank God for my friendship in your life. Then you bless the food as fast as you can with your eyes opening at intervals to be sure the food is still intact.
And then, bon appetite…
With a hospitable smile on my face, I remove all the covers and all the foil covering the plates and you start analyzing the menu. The appetizer is a drink of vanilla and nutmeg powder… hmmm… ok. The main course is a plate full of white well-sieved flour and a side dish of baking powder with an optional garnishing of raisins and low-fat butter (yeah, there’s also some sugar in a saucer). We’ll be having a chocolate drink to go with it. And finally, the dessert is raw egg (I learnt it’s healthy!) and milk…
On seeing the expression of surprise mixed with hatred on your face (remember you refused to eat your wife’s food throughout the day), I politely explain that I was actually planning to bake a cake, but I worked late today, so just decided to serve the ingredients of the cake (at least it’s the same thing… right?)
You feel like renouncing your friendship with me for inviting you for dinner on cake ingredients! You definitely can’t eat this. Ok, let me quickly mix the ingredients and we’d be able to eat it… No, thanks!
My mom bakes great cake… I love great cake… hence, I love my mom!
However, the cake is only great when the ingredients have been mixed and passed through fire! I have sat through the process of baking cake numerous times, and a lot of times, I feel pity for the raisins especially when they’re put into the tasteless flour! When the sugar is added, the mixture tastes ok, but as if they’ve not suffered enough, raw egg is added! Yuk! When the whole mixture is completed and mom asks me to taste it, it tastes just alright. But then, without any mercy, she pours the mixture into a pan and places it in fire! And I can hear the raisins and sugar crying, “what have I done to deserve this?” However, when they come out of the oven, I see the smile on their faces as they say, “thank God I went through the fire or I wouldn’t have turned out this good!’
In my few years of living, I have had a mixture of great and not so great experiences. In fact, some of the experiences would qualify as awesome, while others would definitely qualify as terrible. We look back over our lives and there are experiences we wish we could relive every day of our lives, while there are others we wish we could erase from our history. Experiences of exciting birthdays, promotions, financial breakthroughs, admissions, successful completion of a project or phase of life, great physical and emotional wellbeing… mixed with experiences of sickness, failure in exams, loss of jobs, bankruptcy, loss of loved ones, estrangement from loved ones… the lists are endless.
We need to understand that while not all experiences come from God, God can use both the positive and negative experiences to build us up. The Bible, in Romans 8:28 aptly describes this: And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for them.
It is important for us to learn how to deal with our experiences – both the positive and the negative ones.
- Embrace your experiences. Experiences are the realities of life. Rather than run away from them, we need to accept them and hand them over to God to bring good out of them. Faith in God is what translates us from what we are to what we should be. Distancing ourselves from our experiences doesn’t make them less real than they are.
- Extract something from them. In every experience we face in life, there’s always a lesson to be learnt. When you fall, make sure you pick up something while standing up. Our experiences can be sources of great lessons that will develop our character for future blessings.
- Employ them to help others. One of the greatest ways in which to use an experience is to help others with what you’ve learnt from it. The best person to minister to a person who is experiencing cancer is someone who has experienced it. The best person to minister to a person who is grieving the loss a loved one is a person who has experienced grief.
It is interesting to note that all things work together for good – including the stupid decisions we made ourselves.
The beauty of cake comes out when both the great tasting ingredients (like the sugar, raisins, milk) and the not so great tasting ones (like the flour, nutmeg, vanilla) are mixed together and placed in the hot oven to bake. Each of the ingredients has its own role to play in making the cake a bona fide member of the “Great Cakes League”! In the same way, our lives are made beautiful when we allow God to take all our experiences (both the positive and negative ones), and work them together till good is brought out of our lives to His glory and honor!
