Right Ingredients

My mother taught me and my siblings the basics of cooking. Her first lesson was cooking a hard boil egg. 3 minutes for soft and 5 for hard boiled. I watched her several times baking from scratch, sometimes without a recipe.

Once I watched her make an entire cake measuring flour and sugar using her cupped hands to estimate how much to add. She had an intuitive sense how to take a few ingredients and make it into something both tasteful and nutritious.

By no means do I consider myself a professional chef. But I've learned that some ingredients just don't mix and can spell disaster. And to create a balance in flavor and harmony (e.g. tempering sweetness with an acidic ingredient).

Cooking is an extension of my creativity but when I'm under a lot of pressure and distress, frozen or ready meals soon take the place of a home cooked dinner.

So what are the right ingredients to heal a distressful soul?

We understand our circumstances may not change but even get worse. But our spirit can be changed through the grace of God to ride through any storm or what may seem like a kitchen nightmare.

Perhaps, God is turning up the heat to extract out the worst in us so He can bring out the best things hidden from our understanding.

He takes the ingredients of hard circumstances (which may taste like red hot pepper flakes) and adds them to stew of sorts in our lives. The final outcome is a wonderful and wholesome meal for others who are starving - they come to us to be feed the food or bread of heaven - because God has taken the distressful ingredients and tempered it with His grace!

I'm reminded of the prophet who was told the soup was poisonous because of a wild vine added to the soup. Elisha said, "Get some flour." He put it into the pot and said, "Serve it to the people to eat." And there was nothing harmful in the pot. (2 Kings 4:41 NIV).

God knows how to heal us. Transform what is ugly and distressful into something beautiful. He can also add flour (His word) to our lives to neutralize the poisonous effects of distress.

So if you find God in the kitchen...what He's making or baking will always make you hungry for more of Him!