Chocolate Chip Cookies

Below is a section from,"It's Your Time: Activate Your Faith, Achieve Your Dreams, and Increase in God's Favor" by Joel Osteen. This really spoke to Scott and I. It helped us put things in perspective and know that God has a plan for us. It helped us to remember to stay strong and be faithful.

"A church member stopped me the other day and told me he’d lost his job of many years. He didn’t understand why this had happened to him. “I gave that company my best. I was loyal. I was always there on time. It was just not right,” he said.

I told him that although life is not always fair, God is fair. The Scripture says in Romans 8:28 that God causes all things to work together for our good. The key word is together. You cannot isolate one part of your life and think…This is not good. It’s not good that I got laid off. It’s not good that my loved one got sick. It is not good that my relationship did not work out.

That in itself is not good. But God can see the big picture. That disappointment is not the end. Your life doesn’t stop because you got a bad break. That is simply one part of the puzzle. There will be another piece that connects it all. It will work together for your good. My children and I loved to make chocolate chip cookies when they were younger. We baked together so often we didn’t need the recipe. We knew exactly what to do. Each of us had a role: Jonathan was in charge of the brown sugar and the eggs. Alexandra was our flour, baking soda, and vanilla person. And I was the bowl and mixer man.

We were very precise cookie makers. We always put in exactly the same amount in the same order. We used two bowls because at one point, we mixed the contents of the smaller bowl into the larger bowl. We beat in one egg at a time. We’d learned that to make the best tasting cookies, we had to follow our special family recipe down to the last chocolate chip.

Once, we forgot to put in the baking soda. I thought it was no big deal since we used only a teaspoon of it. “How could that matter in such a large bowl?” But those cookies came out of the oven flat as could be. They weren’t chocolate chips. They were chocolate chunks. They didn’t rise one bit. They were thick as wood chips. Nobody would eat them.

What was the problem with this batch of cookies? We left out a key ingredient. Though just a spoonful was missing, it made a huge difference.

Some people are bitter about life because they haven’t waited for all of the ingredients to come together. God has promised a great plan for you. He has predestined you to live in victory.

When bad things happen, you might not understand the purpose. You may not understand why you lost your job, why you became ill, why your relationship hit the rocks. Don’t get stuck there. God has more ingredients coming your way.

It’s time to trust.

You may feel your life is flat today: flat finances, flat career, flat marriage. But all God has to do is add His own heavenly baking soda and your life will rise to a new level.

Here’s the key: When you go through a disappointment, when you go through a loss, don’t stop on that page. Keep moving forward. There’s another chapter in front of you."