Cookies

Cookie

By Shasta Hofer

6/10/2010

Growing up, I sometimes felt my house was a cookie factory.  Cookies were the currency of love, bribery, even fun.  I can make lots of different types, but without fail it was always the chocolate chip cookie I would make.  That recipe is so ingrained into my being that I can mix it in the dark by touch.  I loved and still love this recipe because you can vary it so much.  Each person that makes it can make the cookie taste different.  Even the individual cookies come out of the oven looking different.  Rarely are they the same.  Chocolate chip cookies were not made to be exactly the same.  Maybe that is why I love to make them.  It may also be because of who I make the cookies for.  A lot of cookies require cookie cutters.  Cookie Cutters are amazing things.  They come in all shapes and sizes.  Cookie cutters are made to make each cookie look the same - A repeat of the last one.  Picture perfect.  The same.  No individuality. 

            But that is not how believers are to behave.  Believers are not made to be cookie cutters.  God created us all different.  We all have different purposes.  But then why do we look like perfect sugar cookies? 

            When society is looked at there are many forms of cookie cutters.  There are the Suzy homemakers; the Merry Martha merchants; Crushed Chris Loafers; Monsterous Consuming Muchers; the Work to late ignore your family work-aholics;  the legalistic Bertha Baptists; the Sunday Morning picture perfect family; and the I will do my own thing people.  We are encouraged to be our own people, be an individualist.  Don’t conform to what society wants! 

But people do.  They do no follow their own paths.  They walk another’s path - One that is already forged.  Striking out on your own is hard.  There is much pain and intensity.  But it is what we are called to do.  In his book, None but the Hungry Heart, Miles J. Stanford writes

God has a unique plan concerning each one of us.  The secret of realizing our personal calling is not to look at others, but simply to walk in close fellowship with the Father” (5-13 Free, to Serve). 

We are not meant to be the same.  But life is filled with so many directions, guides, standards, and patterns it is not hard to see why people often find something to mimic and copy.  During the same devotional, Miles J. Stanford also wrote

You may say, ‘show me pattern man.’ We all like to copy; but there is no gain in copying.  You have to learn the Lord for yourself.  All you learn for yourself will remain, and nothing else.  Everyone has his own history.

People have their own paths and their own lessons.  Copying only allows us to live someone else’s life.  Life is an amazing journey we have been blessed with.  We need to live our own lives, not others.

It is plain enough that every believer is called of God to something definite.  The real difficulty is to ascertain the specialty, and this I do not think can be discovered but in nearness to the Lord, and when you are interested in His interests.  We first learn that He is interested in us, and then we gradually become interested in His interests.  It is then you apprehend your mission in life.  – J.B.S.

Do you want to be another sugar cookie in life?  Or do you want to be a chocolate chip cookie?  Live your life the way God meant it to be!