"MOOOOOOOOM! THERE NOTHING TO EAT!!!!"
My mother would wear that patronizing look and say, "How can you be starving in a kitchen full of food? There's plenty of stuff here, figure out what you want to eat and make it!" I would grooooooan and roll my eyes and act as though she had just asked me to climb Mount Everest.
There are times when I find myself forced to don an apron. Now I don't consider myself to be an expert chef, but the cooking skills I have acquired did not come easily. I learned - mostly by mistakes - that there are some key ingredients to meal preparation. These are the same skills you need to feed your spirit.
My teenager self also said, "Moooom! Church is so boring!" Her same patronizing tone would reply, "Well, Scott, you get what you seek out of church." I was an expert eye-roller by the time I matured. I have now learned she was actually right. You can spiritually starve in a church full of the spirit. The Savior said, "And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away." (Mark 4:5-6) Meaning that some people had the spiritual food, but they couldn't cook it and they found themselves starving.If you want to eat it sometimes you have to make it yourself. Reference the Little Red Hen here if you need. It is liberating and wonderful to realize you're in the mood for chocolate cake, so you pull out the cookbook, and an hour later you have cake. Whatever I'm hungry for I can have - as long as I'm willing to put in the work for it. As for the spirit Nephi learned in a vision: "And blessed are they who shall seek to bring forth my Zion at that day, for they shall have the gift and the power of the Holy Ghost;" (1 Nephi 13:37). So here are few things I have learned help make the chocolate cakes turn out better, and help bring the spirit stronger.
1) Check that you have the ingredients BEFORE you start
C'mon - you've done it too. I get near the bottom of the Crispy Brownie recipe and it says, "Now mix the vegetable oil into the mix and after stirring combine with the other two pans." So I go grab the... I grab... let's see, it's usually right here....If you flip the cookbook page there's a similar Brownie that doesn't use vegetable oil, but it's too late now. This leaves you with three choices, chuck the whole thing, run to the store, or beg from your neighbor. I've had this happen on Sunday with a big recipe, and you know you're going to end up begging. The only thing that eases the humiliation is that you know your neighbor will do the same thing next week.
My mother will look through the cupboards first and then find a recipe that matches what she has. No so for the macho guy here. I'll pick what I'm hungry to eat, and then plow ahead - begging from three different neighbors so that no one knows what an idiot I am. Once I even made two separate trips to the store. It would be so much easier to read the recipe first instead of just reading the next line. It's because of guys like me that cookbooks have as their first line "Preheat the oven to 350 now because we all know you're too dumb to see that you'll need to use the oven at the end."
If I want to get the most out of church then my preparation starts long before I get there. Having the scriptures and the lesson manual means I can follow along and if I've read the material and had a prayer in my heart I'll get much more out of it. If I look ahead in my life and see what things are likely to be a trial that week then I can find things in the lesson that will help me. I can get better spiritual food if I read the recipe and check my ingredients first.
2) Don't juggle eggs.
Now how could an incorrigible show off resist? The problem with juggling eggs isn't just that it's dangerous, it's really a problem of losing focus on what's most important. Whenever I have sacrificed the top priority for several things of lower priority I have always regretted it. My memory of the home economics class in high school still stings.
Just to be clear my mom made me take the class. Something about being "well-rounded", I dunno, I was busy rolling my eyes. However Diane was in the class, and that almost made it worth my time. Diane was an exchange student from Ireland and she had this same sultry voice like a GPS. It became my mission in that class to impress this girl. Fortunately I had incredibly hot skills like juggling.
One day we were making coffee cake (there's no real coffee in it in case someone gets distracted by the name). The cake needed three eggs - exactly the number I can juggle. Of course I did. Now before you tell me it was stupid let me just say I am really good at juggling. I can catch whatever I juggle 95% of the time and in statistics we call that pretty confident. The unfortunate thing is that means if I juggle about 20 loops or so I'm bound to finally miss one, and one is all it takes. The egg splatted, and wouldn't you know the teacher said we could not get another one. Oh well, what's one little egg? At least it made Diane smile.This story is memorable because I made number of mistakes, so I'll tell you the horrid ending later. For now let me just say my problem was that I was more concerned about impressing Diane than in completing the cooking assignment. If you drop the most important priority it will not matter what you picked instead. In church the priority is to be more like Christ. If you learn incredible history, or catch up with old friends, or complete an assignment you still dropped the egg unless you drew closer to Christ. The Lord himself said, "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." (John 12:32) The purpose of Christ's death and atonement was to help us be like him.
Have I learned my lesson? Well... maybe. I still juggle eggs when I'm trying to be cool. I still clean it up afterwards. And sometimes I go to church checking duties and responsibilities off like that was all that matters. It's especially easy to do with little kids because it takes all my energy and thought to guide them. I am grateful for the times when the spirit nudges me to pause for a moment and seek the spirit and set some goal to be more Christlike. That sort of focus avoids the pitfall of being church active and spiritually starving. Now if only the spirit would stop nudging me while juggling...
3) More of a good ingredient is not always better.
There were three of us in the home economics group. I suspect all three of us wanted to impress someone in that class. After dropping the egg my fellow group members were not happy towards me, but I informed them that all we needed to do was to substitute other good things for the egg. Since we were no longer restricted by the recipe anymore we decided most of the measurements would benefit from a tweak.
First was sugar. The recipe said 2 cups, but we like sugar. We voted, and it turns out we all liked sugar a lot. So an extra half cup went in. The cinnamon was supposed to be only 2 teaspoons. Teaspoon? Have you seen that tiny guy? Make it a tablespoon and now you're talking. Then the vanilla! Oh, how marvelous the smell. We passed the bottle under everyone's nose, and that was enough to convince us. We didn't try to find the teaspoon, we just sprinkled it on until our cake smelled wonderful. After all - if a little vanilla is good, then a lot of vanilla would be GREAT! Just wait 'till those girls tried a bite of this!
Right now half of you are thinking "Oh that's terrible, this will end disastrously!" but the other half are thinking, "Yeah man! Right on, that totally makes sense." We call that half the males. The math is very simple, if x is good, then 2*x is twice a good! Sometimes I try to apply that logic to life and it ends just as badly. If going to work is good, then staying at work is better! Or if buying my wife a gift makes her happy, then a big expensive gift will make her ecstatic! If the lord wants me to serve in this calling then taking over other callings will bring massive blessings! It was this kind of logic that caused my mission president to make a rule we could only fast once a month. Some Elders had actually caused some serious health problems.
Helaman's warriors "did obey and observe to perform every word of command with exactness" (Alma 57:21). They were blessed for doing what they were commanded and not trying to go beyond Helaman's instructions. I'm not talking about going the extra mile (from Matthew 5:41), I'm talking about times when the Lord has given clear instructions and asked us to follow the recipe. We are to be self-sufficient, to teach our children, to love our spouse, to serve in the church, and to do missionary work. All of those are good things, and it is up to each of us to find the right balance. If I find myself getting too far on any one ingredient my life will be out of balance and end up like my coffee cake.The taste ended up not being the real issue. You see what I didn't expect was that the combination of dry and wet ingredients was key to creating a moist crumb cake. Our mushy concoction couldn't fluff and didn't rise. It wasn't consistent and since the middle sunk in the topping hardened into a rock on the middle. No one wants a cake that looks like Play-Doh, and the girls all declined a taste test. That ended up being a good move since we messed up the next step
4) Baking Soda is not Baking Powder
Turns out the one a coffee cake needs is baking powder. Now really both boxes were the same size and next to each other in the cupboard, so I feel like the teacher should share some blame. She should have known there were three boys who would be staring at the next kitchen space over (and to be fair this one wasn't my mistake - I blame Doug). Honestly none of us were even aware of the mix up until the very end. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I know it tasted like sheetrock from a moss factory. The teacher was the one that diagnosed the problem. When we discovered the mistake we replied, "So? They can't be THAT different." The girls fell into a fit of giggles.
5) You cannot double the oven temperature and bake it in half the time
Don't laugh - it's a very natural experiment to try. It happens when you're running out of time, especially when juggling eggs and showing off for the girls in the next cubicle. We knew we had 10 minutes before the end of class, and the recipe said 20 minutes. We cranked up the temperature and threw it in. There's no way we were going to be late for our next class over a coffee cake. When it came out of the oven we were expected to each take a piece and leave a piece for the teacher. It is worth noting that the girls in the next cubicle were enjoying a delicious slice of cake. When the teacher saw us pulling our concoction out of the oven she rushed over, eager for us to finish on time.
It took one look to know something was wrong. The cake had sunk in the middle, and the topping had slid into the center and become a solid rock of sugar. The outer edge was burnt while the middle was still soggy. It was technically after this that the teacher diagnosed the baking soda/baking powder problem. She spit out the one bite and I spit out my own taste, and Doug decided not to try it.
6) Each ingredient is not as good as the finished recipe
We all know cookie dough is sometimes better than the baked version. But cookie dough is made from flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and salt. If you tried to eat each of those in turn it would be nasty. I would know, there are lots of times I have tried to snitch cookie dough before my mother turned on the mixer. It's terrible. Something magic happens when those ingredients mesh and combine. A synergy that can't be duplicated by tasting each ingredient in turn.Getting the most from church means changing your whole life. When a talk inspires me I'll often focus on the topic of that talk without realizing the other aspects of my life that need improvement. I'll say "I'm going to be more patient with the kids", but I still forget my morning prayer. Jesus said, "It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened." (Luke 13:21). A desire to live more righteously should start to affect your whole life all mixed together. Keeping the sabbath day better leads to a more meaningful fast, which changes the way I pray and improves my scripture study which helps me remember Christ when I am stressed which helps me be more forgiving and be a better missionary and write in my journal and keep other commandments.
I hope reading this makes us all think, "What areas could I improve in?" When I truly desire to get the most out of church I follow Sunday service with a prayer that says, "Father, please show me other areas in my life that I can improve in". That's means work, but it's as powerful as turning on a mixer, and the resulting cookie dough is magic.
7) Making the food is an important part of the recipe
To explain what this means just try making cookies with little kids in the room. They watch each ingredient with wide eyes. They smell the food in the air and try to sneak a pinch of each ingredient. They watch the beaters with hope, and they dance around the table in excitement. When you put a cookie sheet in the oven they will sit there and stare through the glass as if their eyes could bake the cookies alone. When it comes out of the oven nostrils are flared and they are so hungry for the cookie they will burn their tongues just to taste them 10 seconds earlier. At that magic moment a parent has amazing powers of manipulation over the child. Things like "You need to make your bed." send children scattering to their rooms to do the chore as quickly as possible. You could say, "only children who have done 10 pushups get a cookie" or "You only get a cookie after you've finished washing, sorting, and folding all the laundry" and I swear they will move heaven and earth to try to accomplish your wishes.
Contrast that with cookies you buy at the store. You open the box, everyone grabs one, "thanks Dad" and they're gone. Imagine telling the kids, "You can only get a cookie if your bed is made!" You'll hear responses like "What? That's not fair, I don't want a cookie then." The difference is because the making part plays with their little heads. The get more hungry, more intense, and their imaginations are focused on the food. Even if the cookies somehow tasted exactly the same baked or store bought you would find kids would be more eager for the cookies they say being baked.
A good Sunday School teacher knows this tactic. If you want your kids to devour the gospel then you want them to be hungry. You'll use all the baking secrets you know to make a delicious treat and by the time you call them to repentance they'll be eager to take a bite. I have tried to do that here - talking about food should have made you feel hungry. That's the feeling you need to have when you go to church. "Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work" (D&C 4:3). A desire is always the first step. It is possible to make yourself hungry for church, and then you will find yourself doing what Thomas did at age two.
Thomas had a hunger and he sought out the good food that would strengthen him. That hunger came from recognizing his need for more, and visualizing where he could get it. I hope as he grows older he will keep his hunger for church, and find righteous ways to prepare himself for a Sunday feast. He will learn to follow the Lord's recipes and create snacks that build spiritual strength for the whole week. I hope he learns from his Dad's mistakes and cooks lessons that don't end in laughter. I hope he stands before God and says, "Thy church was full of wonderful food - thanks for letting me cook."
