How's your cooking?

I fancy myself as somewhat of a decent cook. My greatest culinary triumphs are when I take a recipe and tweak a few ingredients here and there, and actually manage to improve the taste of the dish. I have been known to convert avowed shrimp haters into shrimp lovers, with my ‘secret’ bacon-wrapped-shrimp recipe. The real key to being a successful cook, I believe, is your willingness to take risks. Ultimately a dish works because of what you put into it. It really is all about the ingredients. Some things work really well together and titillate the palate in the most amazing ways. Other things, you politely smile at, and push them around on your plate until the requisite amount of time has passed so that you can excuse yourself from the disaster masquerading as a meal.

One of the key ingredients to being a successful Christian is faith (or trust). The Bible says that without faith it is impossible to please God. That puts a bit of a damper on trying to live a Christian life based solely on what you can see, or fully comprehend. That means that your ‘Christianity recipe’ is always going to taste slightly off, if the ingredient of faith isn’t present. I’m still on this theme of flying that struck me as we landed in Charlotte a few days ago (in case you didn’t recognize it and you were thrown off by the cooking analogy), and I’m convinced that all of us who venture out into the wide open blue skies, exercise a huge measure of faith in the wisdom of men. Why else would we trust our lives to two people in a tiny 4X4 cockpit with a bank of instruments that, to us, might as well be rocket science, flying a thin metal tube with two rather flimsy wings attached, unless we trusted implicitly that they knew what they were doing?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never checked the credentials of a pilot before boarding the flight. I trust implicitly that he knows what he’s doing. If I can have faith in fallible and mortal men, why on earth do I struggle so much with exercising the same faith in a God who has demonstrated over and over again, His love for me? I so 'badly' want to be a good Christian, and like cooking, I already know the ingredients necessary to make the recipe turn out great. Now I just need to be willing to take the ‘risk,’ mix it up, and jump in with both feet at the deep end. How’s your cooking… I mean, your faith?