Crazy Love

I must confess, I spend a whole lot of time thinking about food. It's a beautiful thing. I am deeply in love with it. Recently I have started passing the time by looking through cooking websites, reading recipes, gazing at the pictures. Maybe it's just the house-mom hiding within all women, but I dream of being a highly talented chef, able to look at a pile of ingredients and spontaneously whip up something delicious, always knowing exactly what to do, what to add, a pinch here, a tablespoon there. In my mind, I have a perfect internal clock; I never have to set the oven timer, I just instinctively know when my extravagant dishes are at their best. (Have I thought about this a lot more since seeing the movie Julie & Julia? Absolutely.)

In reality, I am not a horrible cook. If I have a very specific recipe to follow, I can make things well. Sometimes I can add teensy variations and pretend to myself that I am brilliant and spontaneous because my "extra-touch" did not make the food explode. But on the occasions when the recipe is not specific enough and I have to answer for myself questions like, "How long should I bake this?" "How much of such and such ingredient should I add?" my creations illicit responses like, "See? It only needed more sauce," or "You know what's REALLY good? The cookies you made last week." On occasions when the recipe is specific enough, I can often still manage to mess it up. For example, I have learned through experience that if you forget both the sugar and the brown sugar in oatmeal cookies, the results are not pretty. I have also scraped many a charred cookie into the trash because of my own forgetfulness.

Despite my best attempts, I am just not consistently competent. I cannot create beautiful masterpieces every time without fail. In fact, so often I fall on my face. I forget the sugar; I burn the cookies. And sometimes it can be so intimidating to know that the God who I serve IS perfect. But luckily for me, his word says (in Romans 5:8) "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." God loves us. While we were still sinners, while we were scraping burnt cookies off the tray, he demonstrated his love in the most powerful way he could, because (and here's the crazy part) we are worth it to him. I hope that you know that.

Truly His,
Caroline