A Quarter Cup is a Quarter Cup
I changed the recipe. It didn’t work. I’d accidentally used baking soda instead of baking powder in the batch of cookies I was mixing up. While baking, they spread far and wide connecting the dots, so-to-speak, which had been scooped upon the pan.
As my siblings tasted them, I distinctly remember mom hushing their gags with a gag look all her own. “Hmmm—they’re good,” they lied.
They didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to. The shape was off by inches and each bite left an odd taste upon the tongue. Rather than soft and sweet, they were crunchy and bitter.
I was supposed to add the ingredients it called for and I didn’t. Thus, it was now a fiasco. If memory serves, the whole botched batch was eventually tossed. And it just goes to show you—you can’t just toss in anything and think it will turn out as it was meant to. For example, had the recipe called for butter, I couldn’t add tomato juice and expect it to turn out. If it called for a half cup of raisins, I couldn’t toss in five cups without the end result being quite different. If it called for a quarter cup of milk and I doused it with a carton, needless to say, it just wouldn’t work.
What about life? Where does one go to find the recipe for it, or the recipe for that which we are seeking in life? Which ingredients are important and which ones can be left out without the end result being a total catastrophe? Where do we look to for direction? Or can we toss out the cookbook altogether and have it be no big deal?
The answers we seek can be found. “Ask, and it shall be given to you. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and whoever seeks, finds; and to anyone who knocks, it will be opened” (Matt. 7:7–8).
Sounds easy enough—until we start knocking on doors that have no real answers. Matthew’s answer differs from what the culture in which we live might give. And what answer might the culture give? Sit for a moment and ponder the rest of this article. As you will read, there is a purpose why things have gone from following what was created to recreating pretty much everything around us. This snippet was taken from a book I received in the mail. In it was this.
“What was once bandied about only in rather high philosophical circles has now become the standard view of young people in high schools and universities across the West. Subjectivism and voluntarism, brought together powerfully by Niezche, Sartre, and Foucault, have become, for many people in our society, especially the young, a sort of default position. Through an assertion of one’s will, one has the right to define the meaning of one’s own existence. If that language sounds familiar, it is because it is taken directly from the Supreme Court ruling in 1992 in the matter of Planned Parenthood v. Casey: ‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.’ That absolutely outrageous statement would have struck Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas as absurd’” (Bishop Robert Barron).
If we understand that which surrounds us, perhaps we may better understand that which has fed the fruit being produced. When the foundation is uprooted, it can be recipe for disaster. Lest we forget let us ask what it is He has to say about all this. It’s foundational. “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit. For without me, you are able to do nothing” (John 15:5).
We can do nothing without Him. I suppose we can certainly try—but it sure seems that’s not working so well. Simple it is: ask, seek, knock and He will answer. He will. Amen.
Kathleen Kjolhaug, Theology in the Trenches
Photo: A bowl of batter. Taken by S. Nancy Bauer.
