Don’t you love cookie recipes that give you a lot of leeway in creating your own variations?

The instructions will give you the ingredients for a basic cookie, but then list options for different flavours or additions to create your own version.

Perhaps you want to add pecans instead of chocolate chips. Or maybe you’d rather substitute mint flavouring in place of vanilla.

These build-your-own cookie recipes sure are versatile. You get to pick and choose exactly what you want to put in the dough.

Don’t you wish life was like this?

Do you ever wish you could have chosen the “recipe” for your life story? That you could have picked out beforehand which “ingredients” would be part of your life?

It’s probable that many of us might have chosen some different elements to be in our lives than what we ended up with.

I suspect that some of us might wish we’d been born into a different family, one not quite so quirky or difficult. Minor royalty, perhaps, but nothing too ostentatious. Many of us would still like to have had siblings, certainly, just not the exasperating ones we have right now!

We might have liked to have been born in a warmer country, but not too warm, thank you very much. We may be happy with the city we were raised in, but maybe we’d rather have grown up in a more genteel neighbourhood, and not next door to cranky old Mr. Smith, whose yell of “Get offa my lawn!” was a constant refrain of your childhood.

We may wish we’d been born with a talent for singing, instead of sounding like an injured rhinoceros when we tried to warble a tune. Maybe we’d always yearned for fame and fortune, but encountered more hardship and obscurity than we’d bargained for.

There are a lot of things we might wish were different about the “recipe” of our lives, but we must trust the wisdom of the Master Baker.

God is the one who determined where you’d be born, and into which era of history. He chose the specific family and parents you’d have. He’s made the recipe of your life exactly right for you.

“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvellous—how well I know it.
You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
before a single day had passed.” (Psalm 139:13-16 NLT)

God placed you where you are for a reason. The recipe of your life has given you a unique set of experiences, skills and character traits. These will equip you to make a difference in people’s lives that no one else can.

So don’t be resentful if your recipe isn’t like other people’s, if you’re a lemon torte rather than a chocolate cake, or if your life is full of walnuts instead of butterscotch chips.

God knew what He was doing when He assembled the ingredients list for your life. You have qualities and talents that others don’t, precisely because of the unique recipe God chose for you.

There’s no one else exactly like you, and that’s exactly what God intended!

© 2020 Lori J. Cartmell. All rights reserved.