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Alice had promised a cake for the church fete but forgot until the morning of the event. Rummaging through the cupboard she found a packet of cake mix and quickly made it while drying her hair, dressing, and helping her son pack for Scout camp. When Alice took the cake from the oven the centre had dropped flat.
This cake was important to Alice because she wanted to be to fit in to her new community of friends. She knew there wasn’t time to bake another cake, so, being inventive, she looked around the house for something to build up the centre of the cake. Alice found it in the bathroom - a roll of toilet paper. She plonked it in the centre and covered it with icing. The finished product looked perfect.
Before she left home to drop the cake at the church hall and head for work, Alice woke her daughter Amanda and gave her some money and specific instructions to be at the fete the moment it opened at 9:30 to buy the cake and bring it home.
When Amanda arrived at the sale she found the perfect looking cake had already been sold. She grabbed her cell phone and called her mom. Alice was horrified - she was beside herself. Everyone would know! What would they think? She would be ostracized, talked about, and ridiculed! All night, she lay awake thinking about people pointing fingers at her and talking about her behind her back.
The next day Alice was booked into a charity lunch at the home of a prominent member of the community. She had doubts about going because the hostess was a bit of a snob who more than once had looked down her nose at Alice because she was a single parent and a relative newcomer to the village. But having already RSVP'd, she couldn't think of a believable excuse to stay home, so she decided to try not to think about the cake and just have a good time.
The meal was elegant, the company was definitely upper crust and, to Alice's horror, her cake was presented as dessert! Alice felt the blood drain from her body. She started out of her chair to tell the hostess all about it, but before she could get to her feet, the Mayor's wife said, “What a beautiful cake!” Alice fell back in her chair expecting to be exposed when she heard the hostess say, “Thank you. Of course I baked it myself.” Alice smiled and thought to herself, “God is good.”
A phrase that used to be used a lot when I was a child was ‘be sure that your sin will find you out.’ We tend to think of this in terms of natural justice, something coming back to bite you. But in its original context, a quote from the Bible, it isn’t really about retribution, it’s more a warning that you will always have to live with the consequences of your actions. A few thousand years ago it was a warning that if the Israelites (you may remember the story of their escape from slavery in Egypt and crossing the Red Sea etc.) opted out of following God’s plan they would have to bear the negative consequences of going it alone. Sin in this case meant ignoring what God was saying was best for them.
We don’t always like to think that our own decisions and actions, and certainly the things that we say, could actually be responsible for some of the less than helpful stuff that goes on. But ultimately, the world we live in is the sum total of millions of individual contributions, yours and mine included.
Every blessing Graham Robinson |
