“I have pitched my tent in the land of hope.”
~Acts 2:26
I happened to tune into another Joel Osteen sermon (you can view it at the bottom of the post) on Sunday and once again it was exactly the right message at exactly the right time that I needed to hear it. He spoke to people who are having setbacks and feeling discouraged and who are, in a sense, questioning “why do these things keep happening to me” or “why isn’t what I’m doing enough”. It was how I have been feeling for the last week and a half now and I have to say that what Joel Osteen spoke about made a lot of sense.
He said that you can’t isolate all of the different moments in your life and dissect what was wrong in each moment because separately they will look unfair and they will look like some of the worst moments in your life. However, collectively, once all of the pieces have come together, it will all somehow make sense. He used the example of the different moments we go through, good or bad, being the ingredients in the overall recipe for our lives.
Just as with baking a cake or cookies, separately the ingredients are just plain ingredients that don’t seem like they would taste like much on their own, but once they are all mixed together, they make something wonderful. If you think about it, a cookie mix, without the baking soda to make it rise, just comes out flat because there is an ingredient missing that was necessary for everything to make sense. When I think of it like that it somehow makes all of the pieces fit. With all of the experiences that we go through in life, we have to know that they are somehow necessary in order for you to get to the next level of your destined path.
Osteen said “God is the master chef and the recipe for your life has already been established. God has planned your days for good from beginning to end and he knows exactly what to add and when to add it. He’s going to put in just the right amount at just the right time so that you can become everything that he has created you to be. God has ingredients coming your way that are going to thrusts you to a new level and he has ingredients that are going to cause everything to make sense.”
When he said that he referenced it to that bad childhood, that opportunity that didn’t come to fruition, that loved one that walked out of your life right when you needed them (or so you thought), that job you lost that you thought was going to be the answer to you prayers, that bad break-up that you are still not quite over, the money that you were counting on that didn’t come through at the time that you really needed it the most. All of these “bad breaks” don’t make sense on their own and they are down right frustrating, but once you do achieve the purpose that you are destined to fulfill, it will somehow all make sense.
I have this passion (aside from writing of course) to find a way to do something about the bullying epidemic that has gotten out of control in society over the last decade or so. But had I not gone through the bullying that I went through in school or even the bullying and abuse that I had to endure from my own mother at home, I might not find myself headed in that direction and feeling the need to be an agent of change in that area. It is because of those experiences that I went through that make me want to do so much to change this world and to be a part of making it better. They didn’t make sense at the time that I was going through them, but they are all starting to make much more sense now.
Each moment is like the ingredient to the recipe of our lives. They can often be discouraging and disheartening but that is because we keep isolating them instead of mixing them all together and looking at the dish as a whole. Some people are bitter on life because they have not waited for all of the ingredients to come together. Final word from Joel Osteen, “God always ends on all is well” so if all is not well in your life that means that it is not the end, keep moving forward, there’s another ingredient coming.
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310
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