secret recipe.

This post has been percolating for quite a while, now. First the hustle and bustle of finals got in the way, then my refusal to do anything that felt remotely productive for the first few official weeks of summer vacation. I may be biased, but I think I earned it. :-)

Anyways... I have a sneaking suspicion that I've written about this before. Please bear with me if that's the case... Also, please forgive any cheesiness. I was having too much fun with the metaphor. Ha.

But I have this terrible tendency to want to skip the journey. Forget baby steps. If I could, I would teleport myself to the finish line this very second. It's the reason that I don't like starting big projects or papers unless I know I can finish them quickly. Leaving things half-finished makes me feel inadequate. So I try to find the quickest way to lay it all to rest, and in doing so I bypass the lessons I need to learn to actually be able to conquer it all. This habit of rushing through challenges obviously makes for some pretty big messes.

It's like baking with a child. They don't know that you have to crack eggs carefully to keep shells out of the dough. They don't know that you need to cream together the butter, sugar, and vanilla separately before you add the dry ingredients. They don't know that you need to add the flour gradually. And they, of course, have absolutely no patience to learn these things. They want to start heaping things in the bowl to just get to the cookies already, goshdangit! So you have to pry the wooden spoon from their tiny fingers of steel and ask them (to no avail) to be patient, please, and don't eat all the chocolate chips or there won't be any in the cookies! Generally such endeavors end with grimy hands, flour EVERYWHERE, and a tearful tantrum on the kitchen floor.

I am that child.

Thankfully I am blessed to have a wise, godly, loving, caring woman in my life to remind me how bad the cookies turned out last time. Despite her busy life, she makes the hour drive from home to school every Thursday just to pour love into my life and support me in my walk. Here in this blog I will call her Mother Willow (Or Mama W for short. Because that's just more fun.).

So it was a typical Thursday a few weeks ago when I began spouting out my plans to Mama W about how I was going to make it to the finish line when she did just that. She gently reminded me that maybe, just maybe, I needed to stop my plotting and listen to my Heavenly Father. After all, it's his secret recipe.

Immediately I felt silly. How many times had I found myself in the midst of one of these self-made messes? And still I hadn't learned to take my grubby little hands out of it. Immediately I got that image of myself sitting in the middle of my Heavenly Father's big old kitchen of life with floury tears rolling down my cheeks. How frustrated must he be with me?

I detailed the whole thing for Mama W, and she listened patiently in that wise way of hers. How I felt like a child and was frustrated with myself for all the frustration I must be causing Him and all the people that have to eat my rock hard, eggshell encrusted cookies. I realized how disappointed He must be with me. After all, no matter how much you love your child, during those temper tantrums you have to admit they're a bit of a brat.

When my words finally ran dry, she smiled simply and said, "Katie, He's just happy you're in the kitchen."

Thank God my Papa is patient. :)