Monday, October 20, 2014

Lessons learned from cupcakes

I made cupcakes yesterday before church. One of our co-workers is leaving us so I wanted to bring him cupcakes today. Which I did and they were delicious! Cody and I made then into cute, little baseballs because it's our sports writer that is leaving. (Note: The cupcake in the picture is not mine. I forgot to take a picture but this is the general idea of what we did!)

As I was looking on the back of the cake mix box to check what temperature to turn my oven to I noticed the little cupcake note that said something like "fill cupcake liners halfway." I really struggle with this! Seriously, halfway is never enough. Or at least it seems like it's never enough and then you get batter all over your oven!

So yesterday I made a deliberate effort to only fill my cupcake liners halfway. It was torture. I kept thinking, "That's not enough!" and "They won't be good enough!" Then I realized that I have this problem in other aspects of my life. Sometimes I think that I haven't done enough and that my efforts aren't good enough, that I need to do more. I know you've thought that, too.

So as I filled cupcake liners I told myself that it was alright, that if I followed the instructions and didn't get worked up about having to do more than I actually needed to that they would turn out just fine, and they did. Of course, they did.

It reminded me of the times that Heavenly Father tells us to ease up a bit. To not do more than we are doing, to wait a little bit, to ration ourselves. It also reminded me of blessings. That sometimes it seems like our blessing cups are only half full and we may get nervous or feel cheated. But when our halfway cups and our efforts seem like they aren't enough, through Christ (the oven) our efforts and our blessings grow to be exactly as they should be. Full, and plenty.

I don't know if this makes as much sense written out as it does in my head but I know that Heavenly Father knows what He is doing. That even when His instructions don't make sense to us or we want to do more when we are told to wait, that things will work out if we trust and follow Him. Always.