Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Fear Of Missing Out

Image by Wolfgang Eckert from Pixabay

Do you suffer from FOMO?

No, it isn’t some dreaded disease.

Rather, FOMO stands for “Fear Of Missing Out.”

It’s a natural human tendency to worry that we might be losing out on something that others are enjoying or acquiring.

This trepidation can sometimes filter into our spiritual lives, as well.

We might be afraid that if we do things God’s way, we’ll somehow miss out on something.

Perhaps we won’t get to do the things we really want in life, or we’ll have to give up some things we’re already doing. We fear we’ll miss out on all the fun.

We fear God might withhold something crucial from our lives, and our “cake” won’t rise without it: our life will feel diminished.

But we needn’t worry. God only withholds things for our good, and He won’t deprive us of things we truly need.

Our cake will still rise as believers, but on God’s terms.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

All in Good Time

Image by Finn Bjurvoll Hansen from Pixabay

They say cooking is an art, but baking is a science.

Part of what makes baking scientific is that it often calls for exact timing.

When you cook a roast or a turkey in the oven, the estimated cooking time can vary. The meat will be in the oven for several hours, and the recipe might give you as much as a half-hour window to start checking for doneness.

But when you’re baking cookies, the recipe will sometimes only give you a two-minute span to remove them from the oven. You have to be on your toes so you don’t miss this window, but at least you have a greater degree of certainty as to when the baking process will be over.

We humans crave certainty, don’t we? And that’s especially true when we’re going through difficult things in our personal lives.

Wouldn’t you love it if God told us exactly when our time of suffering would end?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell · 1 Comment

The Perfect Recipe for Bread

Photo by Momentmal on Pixabay

There’s nothing quite like the smell of freshly baked bread in your own home, is there?

More and more people are finding this out. One of the surprising consequences of the pandemic-associated lockdowns has been a resurgence of home baking. So many people have been baking bread at home in recent months that some stores have even run out of yeast and flour.

For beginners, it might take some time to get the knack of baking bread from scratch. Even for more experienced home bakers, baking the perfect loaf of bread will take numerous tries and repeated tweaks to the recipe.

The Bible has a few things to say about this life-giving substance. By tracing the story of bread through the Scriptures, we can see how the “recipe” improves over time, culminating in something we all desire:

The perfect bread.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Get Ready for God to Act

Pouring cupcake batter into prepared muffin tins.
Photo by Gina Dittmer.

When you read a cake or muffin recipe, it will usually instruct you to preheat your oven and get your baking pans prepared before describing how to make the dessert itself.

But why do it in this order? Why not make the batter first, and let it sit there in the bowl while you leisurely grease or line the baking pans and let the oven slowly heat up?

There’s a very good reason to have everything prepared before you start the actual baking, and it has to do with how leaveners behave.

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