We celebrated my grandmother’s 90th birthday this past week and per tradition, I made her favorite coconut cake. While I was making it, I was also contemplating the longevity of life. I also began comparing life to that cake that I was making.
There are few things in the world that I love more than dessert.
And at the top of that dessert list is…cake.
More specifically chocolate cake.
It’s rich and sweet and moist and I’m especially happy if I get to eat it warm, with just a slight bit of icing. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it’s the closest I’ll get to heaven on this side of eternity. While I’m enjoying the end product, it’s easy to forget how much hard work went into this satisfying treat.
There are a lot of things that go into a cake and honestly, most of those ingredients aren’t sweet. If you’ve ever tried to make a cake with just sugar and vanilla you without a doubt failed, epically. The cake just doesn’t work without the flour, eggs, butter, and yuck…buttermilk.
You probably wouldn’t want any of those items in their raw state but oh, when they come together and you apply some heat coupled with a little time, you get something that is positively amazing.
This is strikingly similar to life.
We often find ourselves upset because the reality of our lives doesn’t seem to live up to the fantasies that we had built up in our minds. We’re stuck in a long patch of bad and we can barely remember when it was ever good. And we find ourselves just praying for a little more sugar in our lives. But the fact remains that there is a balance to everything. Would we be elated to only know love and passion and joy? Absolutely, but they’re not the same without sorrow and disappointment and pain.
There is a season for each of these and while we may not enjoy all of the seasons, they each have value and they each bring something to the whole. Don’t take for granted your sweet times because they can turn in an instant. Also, don’t fret too much over the difficult times because there is surely a lesson that can be gained. And through it all, give some time to time. Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to when it’s supposed to. We all know what happens when you take a cake out of the oven too soon and who wants that mess?
Know this, when we reach the end, we’ll see that life really is the sum of its parts and overall the cake with our name on it was oh so sweet.
