My ex-partner is a baker. A very good baker. Sometimes he got so consumed in his baking and frosting and decorating, I felt bad for him to get so intense about it. When it came to baking a birthday cake for me, I secretly wished that he would just use an Easy Bake Oven and keep it simple! I am such a silly bear at times!
I don't know about you, but I often wish for an "Easy Bake life". We often make our lives as complicated as a beautiful high-end wedding cake with rolled fondant icing and lots of gum paste flowers! It is beautiful, but waaayyyy too complicated! Let's pray for each other for two things: find things that we can control to make our lives simpler so we can focus more on God and for strength to live our complicated lives more completely for God!
Lord, your Son didn't have an Easy Bake life. We can't expect one either. We know that you are always with us regardless of the recipe!
Simply Saturday
Easy Bake Life
I wondered what I would write about today, then the devotional this morning gave me the idea to expand on the silly line "easy bake life". Like I said above, I am such a silly bear at times!
An easy bake life is just the opposite of a It's a Hard knock life (from the musical Annie)! I guess I had to get a reference in to a Broadway musical! ha! You know the fantasy of an easy bake life: we meet and fall in love with the significant other of our dreams, we win the lottery, we travel the world, we help the poor and helpless, we are admired by everyone, and we never get sick. For most of us, we can only realistically hope for a couple of the things in that list!
The question is: how can we make our lives easier? What recipe could we follow to put it in terms of today's devotional? IMHO, here is the recipe:
- love God above everything and everyone else
- love others as ourselves
If there was every a recipe for an easy bake life, it would be these two things! Why do I say this? First, if we always love God above everything and everyone else, then we know we have our priorities in the right order.We know that God will lead us because we are listening. We know that God is with us because we spend time with him in Bible study and prayer.
Second, loving others as ourselves helps others, obviously, and also helps us. Loving others prevents us from being self-centered and selfish people. Looking upon others as the treasure of God regardless of what they look like or what they say or do is a God-like quality. Loving others also helps us love ourselves more completely as well.
There is no recipe for an easy bake life. Following the two most important things that Jesus told us will help us have a full and meaningful life, and have it more abundantly. Praise God!
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We are far from perfect, but despite our mistakes and our sins, we will never abandon the Lord and he will never abandon us - adapted from a statement about Abraham from the EfM Training Guide
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