Sound of Surviving Blog

I love baking. It’s always been one of my favorite things to do. I used to bake all the time with my grandmother. She always said how she wanted to get me a mixer I could use with one hand. I would reply that there was no need to, that I did pretty well just using a bowl and whisk to mix the ingredients by hand. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked for me. I recently decided, after talking to someone else who bakes, that a stand mixer would be pretty neat to try. I ended up ordering myself one, not sure what to expect. Last weekend, I told my mom that I would make her a cake for her birthday. I used the stand mixer to bake it, and it was so much easier! My arm wasn’t cramping up when I finished, and I wasn’t tired at all, I didn’t have to try to keep the bowl from spinning around on the counter with one hand while mixing everything. The next day, I baked cookies, using my mixer, and was again, amazed at how much energy I still had when they were done baking because I didn’t have to do all the mixing by hand.

As people, we want to be independent, to be able to do everything all by ourselves. This is great, well, at least until it isn’t. We often take on so much that we exhaust ourselves, trying to do all of the things we have to do on our own, and then have no energy left for what we want to do. It’s okay to want to do everything on your own, but it’s also okay to ask for help, to admit that we can’t do it all. This might mean asking other people for help, but it also is true that we can ask God for help. We don’t have to face everything in life on our own; we can go to God, and give him our struggles and our problems, and he will gladly take them for us. In Psalm 55:22 reads, “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.” God doesn’t want us to walk our journeys alone, to have to carry everything, all the time. That’s why he tells us to cast our burdens on him, so that he can walk alongside us, and he will help us. If we don’t have to waste all of our energy mixing the ingredients of our lives together, we’ll be able to enjoy the final product.