Just a Recipe

Do you like coffee? Ewww....I don’t. I don’t even really like the smell of it. It seems awfully bitter to me and just, well, gross! I’m sure my Mom would hang her head in shame as the coffee addiction missed me somehow. My Mom, my Dad and my sister are all coffee drinkers but me, well, I’m a Mountain Dew drinker. I don’t like Starbucks, don’t like cappuccino, don’t like anything fancy and not too fond of anything hot. Girl, I don’t even like taking cough syrup because it feels warm going down my goozle!

But, I do love me some hot chocolate! There is just something about that drink that soothes my soul, warms my heart and makes me feel at home. I can be in a crowded mall, sitting in a traffic jam or running crazy through those zig-zag lines at the court house but you give me a cup of hot chocolate and it is like all of that disappears. Wonder if there is something in that drink that triggers your brain to slow down and just catch your breath? Mmmmmm....I can taste it just thinking about it! In my opinion, it is the drink of champions, the drink of snowmen and the drink of, well, ME!

I have passed my love for hot chocolate onto my precious Gabe. He plans his night according to when he can drink a cup of hot chocolate. If I let him, he would drink a cup at dinner! In the past we would always warm water up on the stove or pop a cup in the microwave but my Mom recently brought a coffee pot over to my house. Yes, yes, the woman drinks SO much coffee that she had to buy me a coffee pot to keep at my house so she could have her coffee when she came to visit! It is sad, I know, she needs our prayers! (Just kidding!) So, me and Gabe learned that we could pour some water into that coffee pot and heat our water up for hot chocolate in a snap. We are like two hot chocolate addicts needing our fix waiting on that water to run through that pot. We have our cups out, the mix in the cup, spoons in hand and we just stare at it thinking "Come on! Hurry up!"

I tend to buy a box of instant hot chocolate mix every few days and decided the other night that maybe it would be fun if Gabe and I made our own mix. How cool would that be? I pulled out of the cabinet a container of cocoa, searched the label for a recipe but found nothing for hot chocolate. I searched the internet for an easy recipe for instant hot chocolate mix and found nothing. Oh, I found plenty of recipes for making it with semi-sweet morsels, milk, vanilla extract and so on but could not seem to come across a recipe for the powder stuff! I begin to ask co-workers if they knew how and no one seemed to know. I begin to think "Is this recipe a big secret like the Bush’s Baked Beans?!?!?! Is this a top secret recipe?!?!?!" I joked with a co-worker that I could probably find instructions to build a bomb easier than I could find a hot chocolate recipe! After a little more searching I did end up finding a fairly easy recipe that me and my little man are going to try out but as always, this got me to thinking.

How great is our God that he gives us an easy to find recipe for salvation. He doesn’t hide it, it’s not a day long search, it is just right there in front of us in plain view. Probably the first verse we all ever learned was John 3:16. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." There it is! How about them apples? Ain’t God good? We go through life trying to complicate everything all day long, at every turn, making mountains out of molehills and just feeling all poor pitiful for ourselves thinking how in the world we are going to find our way out of a situation when we don’t have to search any further for the answer than Jesus. So, stop searching all the crooks and crevices and stop trying to complicate it all and just accept it, just accept him! He’s right there in the open and he’s waiting!