1 Corinthians 13 - Piece of Cake?

I was feeling a bit fragile yesterday and those sitting around me in the meeting would have noticed, as I kept bursting into tears - sometimes in response to what was being said/sung etc and once when the band was playing - um - it was the tune which prompted the tears as opposed to the actual playing! One lovely friend gave me a tissue - kind :)

All kinds of reasons to be feeling this way I guess - a bit tired, a bit stressed, a bit busy with real life as well as work, being a woman of a 'certain age'? etc but also that very morning there had been a bit of a scene over a cake.

Elyse's friend is in a fund raising phase at the moment and her passion is St Francis Hospice, so they had rustled up a plan to sell cakes prior to the meeting while people were having their coffee. Elyse had volunteered us a to make a cake and had found a recipe in a Cook Book someone had bought her for a Christmas some time ago - Thank You Fiona! -The blurb under the title said,' an easy, everyday chocolate cake'

I was rather hoping to get away with some packet mix fairy cakes, but NO!

So on Saturday Afternoon we set about making our cake - I do NOT bake and so, dusty cobwebby ( not good) memories of Home Economics came drifting to the surface as we pondered over the meanings of 'beat' and 'fold'. Elyse and Thomas wanted to help which was lovely, but not feeling overly confident myself, I had to exude confidence and control in heaps, while trembling away on the inside.

Finally the mixture made it to the greased amd lined tin and into the oven - the kids were actually more interested in licking to spoons at that point.

A life time later, it was done and had risen in the middle - not the flat top of the picture in the book -and there was a rather large crack in it too but hey! and was then left to cool, until Sunday Morning when we set about the buttercream bit and the final flourish of frosting of icing sugar and cocoa.

To put what happened next into a bit of context, I have some friends who are great bakers, marvellous bakers, superlative bakers and although it is totally stupid, it really mattered to ME how this cake looked, so when I returned to the kitchen and looked at the cake to find that someone had gone to town with more icing sugar - it looked like Mount Everest had landed on the top - I shrieked, 'Who has done that to The Cake?'

The culprit wrongly suggested that it is only a cake and it doesn't matter how it looks and I made a knee jerk reaction at that highly charged point that we were not going to take the cake, at which point, a quite literally, all hell broke loose.

I have mentioned before that our family have a habit of arguing about the smallest thing and suddenly everyone was having a go and each other about this, while also dragging up any other ammo they could find. I found myself saying that it was ok, it didn't matter, it IS only a cake, and the Phantom Icer was profoundly sorry etc. and then I had to retreat to my room where these words popped into my head,

'Love does not keep a record of wrongs'

and I made up my mind there a then to intentionally live out 1 Cor 13 to my family, to role model love to them until it hurts.

Richard then said in the meeting that he had been speaking to a group of people about being the change that you want to see - or something like that - so I am resolved!