Half-Baked

Have you ever been preparing a meal and see someone so eager to eat it before it was finished? It’s just absurd to imagine serving someone food that has not been fully prepared. Think about the possible negative effects: They could become ill and not to mention they won’t fully enjoy the dish.

Several years ago God spoke to me about this topic while baking brownies. I don’t know about you, but my favorite brownies are the type that has walnuts throughout. After the oven has finished pre-heating, the batter is mixed and poured into the baking dish it’s time to place it into the oven to bake. While it’s baking, you’ll start to smell the sensational aroma, but it’s not ready to eat. The more time passes, the more eager you become to eat them so you start looking through the glass door or opening and closing the door to check…they’re still not ready to eat. It may take 45 minutes to bake before you can eat them. Yet at the 15-minute mark, your taste buds have a completely different idea in mind. This is when it dawned on me: I don’t want anything in life that God has not fully prepared before I received it. More specifically I was thinking about a man. I did not want what I processed as a “half-baked man”.

This is not a movie reference. As a single woman, my revelation was that I did not want to marry a man before he was prepared to enter into that form of covenantal agreement with me. (This goes both ways for both males and females.) With God as the baker in this analogy, I trusted that He knew what being “prepared” or “ready” looked like. Using my sensory skills I could have misjudged the preparedness of the single men I was interested in over the course of time. I perceived they were potentially ready by outward standards, but after brief discussions or interactions, I learned they were not. (Truthfully, I probably wasn’t either…even though my peers perceived that I was.) In my eagerness to marry, I would become disappointed or even frustrated because I saw things I liked externally. But truth be told, inwardly those men still needed time to cook. As a result of the revelation I received, I stopped being so anxious and continued to focus on allowing God to do the work He was doing in me, while I served Him wholeheartedly.

The moral of this story is this: The brownies can represent anything you desire to have in this life. It can be a relationship, career opportunity, object you’d like to purchase, etc. Whether or not we understand the timing for which we can obtain our desires, know that God is fully aware of that timing and it is perfect. He does not desire to provide us with anything that is not meant to be attained outside of its due season. And it’s beautiful to look back and realize why you had to wait and appreciate the time it took because the results are AMAZING! I implore you to wait patiently on God to provide you with what you need and the desires of your heart. Don’t try to take the brownies out of the oven before they are completely cooked. If you do, you may find yourself in a sticky situation.

Other scriptures to consider:

Psalm 37:4

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.

Selah