Baking a Cake

My First Time Moms group has introduced me to Lysa TerKeurst, and oh, how I love her! She came to speak tonight at Hope Pres. I so love the way she writes that I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to out-do it in person, but man, she blew me out of the water. She is so honest and hilarious- started off with a story of her running over a bush in her front yard and taking all day to realize it was sticking out from under the back of her car- that you listen to her wholeheartedly because you feel like she is your best friend.

Her talk tonight focused on 1 Thessalonians 5:

16Be joyful always; 17pray continually; 18give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

I can’t even begin to delve into all the facets of the verse that she discussed nor do it justice (and I can never claim to be a Bible study teacher), but one part of her talk really stuck with me. How to be joyful always. Even when life is ugly. I want to write this down to share with my blog friends and also to remember it for that first time that Helen Grace experiences something awful in life that just is truly terrible and unfair.

Lysa’s 14-year-old daughter was a state champion gymnast. She had worked for years to attain this title, and one normal day at practice as she prepared for a huge meet, she was doing a move that she had done a million times before…but she fell. She injured her shoulder and ended her gymnastic career. Of course, to her this seemed like the end of her world. To you, your life-crushing event could be your mom being diagnosed with cancer or your husband losing his job. We’ve all experienced that feeling of, “Where is God now? How could He let this happen? And how am I supposed to ‘be joyful always’ when my world is falling apart?”

Lysa told this parable to answer those questions. Imagine baking a cake. You need all different ingredients to make the cake taste yummy. If you tasted them individually, it wouldn’t quite be the same. The sugar and vanilla might be tasty, but the flour would be sticky and the raw eggs would be AWFUL.

God does not cause these terrible events-- He allows them to happen; they pass through His hands-- because all of these events in our life, good or bad, create the beautiful masterpiece, the ‘cake,’ of our life. The sweet parts wouldn’t be sweet without the bitter parts. Perhaps He’s protecting us from something worse that we will never know about. Or maybe He’s making us stronger so that we will have perseverance for the road ahead or be a witness to His power. But through these horrible experiences, we are putting our faith in Him, that He knows the reason and will carry us through. And only by doing that can we be joyful always.