The Happy Cake

Sounds like a children's book doesn't it? Yesterday I was baking a cake from scratch. It was the first time in two years I baked anything more complicated than canned biscuits. I made a rum glazed pound cake from a Cooking Light cookbook that I am currently crazy about. As with all cakes from scratch it was a fairly labour intensive process including injecting rum glaze into the cake with a flavor injector (think large syringe) and poking holes in the top then pouring glaze over it so that it soaked in. While making this cake I lost count of the number of times I thought to myself, "I am ridiculously happy right now."

The first week after I quit my job I was very busy just disentangling myself from that job. Equipment had to be disassembled and returned, every piece of paper that had anything sensitive on it had to be burned, there were emails to field and phone calls to make. It was amazing how much work there was to stop working! This week, however, I am starting to do my housewifey things again. Little by little rooms are being properly cleaned, each night there has been a healthy meal made from scratch and no fast food has been bought to compensate from the lack of anyone having the time or the ability to feed the family. I'm starting to feel normal again. The constant stress that I was under for two years has evaporated.

Don't get me wrong. There is still stress. I have a budget to balance and then maintain, I have an 11 month old grandson that I'm very involved in caring for, I have multiple personal relationships to heal, I have menus to plan. There is stress. But it's a good stress. It's stress I can handle because it is related to my obedience to God.

In the last weeks of the emotional coma I mentioned before, I read something on Facebook that in an odd way was the catalyst for the meltdown that led to my returning to being a housewife. It said, "You were created for a purpose. Doing anything else will never make you happy." At the beginning of 2004 our entire church read The Purpose Driven Life together. It was called the 40 Days of Purpose. I learned so clearly that all the dreck my mother had tried to instill in me my whole life about women needing to get advanced degrees and have careers to be useful and worthwhile was just that, dreck. Nonsense. God created me to be my husband's helpmeet. His partner. My role was to care for him, our home, our children and our marriage. And yet without my even noticing it, the devil snuck in and for two years had me convinced I had to have an outside, paying job. It never ceases to amaze me how someone who knows just how sneaky the devil is, still doesn't notice when she is being manipulated by the father of Lies.

But now I'm seeing more clearly. I'm daily remembering that God created me for a purpose and the purpose is to be a Keeper at Home. A Guardian of my Home. Baking a cake from scratch may not seem like an act of obedience but it is. All six of us have a healthy sweet to nibble that isn't filled with chemicals or preservatives and is in fact a low fat dessert. Not a big deal on it's own but certainly a small step in my walk to be what I was created to be. And it starts with a happy cake. Well, the cake may not be happy but the baker sure is!