Ingredients of Life

Have you ever been making something and left out a key ingredient?

This afternoon, while the girls were napping, I decided to surprise them by making a family favorite: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I was throwing ingredients in left and right, trying to get it all done before it was time to start dinner preparations. Mixing like a fiend. Giving my arm a good workout while I worked that spoon round and round.

Finally, I added the chocolate chips. Ahhh, the best part. Now time to try to batter. Yes, I like to live on the wild side. I laugh in the face of salmonella.

Hold on. *insert sounds of spitting batter out* The batter tasted a lot like butter. Ew.

Now, grant it...the recipe did call for TWO whole sticks of the stuff but it's never tasted like that before. Everything about it was gross. Texture. Taste. The Thought of what I was ingesting.

Then I looked over the recipe again. Add Flour. Huh...there on my kitchen counter sat the new bag of flour still sealed closed. Oh. I guess I forgot that stuff.

Allow me to remind you that I had already "finished" the mixture. The oatmeal and the chocolate were already mixed in. So I struggled for the next while trying to get the flour...one of the key ingredients...to mix in. What should have been an easy thing, had I done it at the right time, turned out to be a near impossible task. It just wouldn't blend in. Yet, if I left it out, the cookies would have been a disaster. Inedible. Flat. Disgusting.

In the Bible, the Psalmist speaks again and again of rising early to talk with God. Early in the morning will I rise up and seek thee! Why early? I think it's because if I do it out of order...like I accidentally did with the flour...the whole mix of my day will be harder. I'll spend a better part of my day striving to make things work. And if I leave out that key ingredient all together. The aroma... the taste...the appeal will be all wrong.

And my day will be a far cry from what it was intended to be.

As a mom of a new baby, I tend to be really lax about getting up early to spend time with Jesus. I figure, I've been up all throughout the night. He knows that. He won't hold it against me. He can wait.

But as I stood there, wrestling to get the batter and the flour to mix like it was supposed to...knowing that if I didn't do it, the batter would be trash...the thought occured to me: Getting up early is not about "appeasing" God. It's more about making sure my day doesn't end up as something worthless.

A lot like my batter...without the flour.