I’ve been meaning to write something for awhile on birthday cakes. I don’t have any birthday cakes pressing on me at the moment, the next one won’t be until February, but it seemed as good of a time as any to think about them.
Let’s start by analyzing the last birthday cake I made when Miriam turned three:
Did you catch that? It’s a box mix. And I ran out of frosting. So you can see that it’s never too early for me to start planning.
But the real reason I bring up birthday cakes is because I think that often when we talk about balancing two extremes, balance isn’t really what we’re after at all. So take birthday cakes. You can stay up all night and have a beautiful homemade birthday cake for your child, or you could quickly stop at the bakery and pick up a cute cake and hope they spell you’re child’s name correctly. And we often vacillate between these two extremes confused about whether we love our child best by baking homemade cakes or by still being sane at the birthday party because we picked up one at the bakery. And after thinking through both scenarios we’re likely to say something silly about how it’s all about balance, as if the box mix without enough frosting was the best way to go.
But the idea of balancing rarely get’s at the heart of the way we’re called to love people. Jesus was gentle. He also called the Pharisees a brood of vipers. He wasn’t a happy medium. He was both. And, most importantly, he knew when it was most loving to be each extreme as well as every place in between the two.
That’s what it’s like with birthday cakes. We have to know what it looks like to love. We have to know when it’s loving to make a really nice homemade cake and when making the perfect birthday cakes is about our own selfish ambition. We have to know when it’s loving to drop by the bakery and when dropping by the bakery is really a selfishness way to get out of cake decorating. And we have to be careful about this, because our hearts are tricky. There are loving reasons to make either decision, but it doesn’t mean that those are really our reasons.
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