Think of all the individual ingredients that typically go into chocolate chip cookies: flour, egg(s), baking powder and/or baking soda, and salt. These ingredients by themselves are quite gross. The other ingredients such as brown sugar, sugar, butter, and chocolate chips are very delicious, but typically better when combined with other ingredients.
When baking chocolate chip cookies, the sweet, salty, dry, and bitter all come together to create something beautiful. Isn’t life like that as well?
In life, hardships, grief, waiting, and disappointments feel unpleasant on their own, but they are necessary parts of the recipe. Some seasons of life feel hard, like we can’t catch our breath. Some are as peaceful as a fall morning on the front porch. Some seasons it feels like God’s blessing are pouring down from the sky. Some seasons feel lonely and secluded and we wonder if God hears us.
When we’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to see the good of that particular season. However, God takes the bitter and yucky and uses them in the master recipe of our lives. He takes the bitter and makes it sweet.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us “He hath made everything beautiful in its time: also He hath set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end.”
If it feels like you’re currently going through one of those bitter or yucky seasons, trust God. We, as humans, don’t know how things will play out because we don’t know the “recipe.” But God does. Trust that He will use all the ingredients, or seasons that we go through, to create something beautiful.
