birthday love

It was my mom's birthday this past Thursday. She makes cakes for everyone's birthday so it only makes sense that she has one for hers. Now I'm a pretty decent baker. I'm learning to be a better cook. I have not grown enough to experiment with ingredients on my own. BUT, I can follow a recipe like there's no tomorrow. So..I'm making this cake with this new recipe for a tiny cake (a house of three does NOT need an entire sheet cake lying around the house!) and found what I needed on allrecipes.com

Started having a little trouble. Couldn't find sugar..yadda yadda...didn't have what we needed, couldn't make icing red like I wanted...

In the baking process, I realized whenever I bake something FOR my mom, things always go wrong. Nothing turns out right and I always have to improvise and make stuff up. By the end of the day this is how the cake turned out:



Cute, yes. I just hadn't planned on the cake looking like a ten year old made it.
But the thing is, the lesson of this whole thing, I NEVER wondered if my mom would love it. I knew even if the cake was a gray, big pile with random sprinkles, she would love it. That's how my mom is. She loves the thought and is super grateful with anything you give her.

And that's how God is. Our offerings, no matter what they are, are pretty juvenile in comparison to giving our only Son, like God did. Our presentations and sacrifices to God probably look like kindergarten finger paintings. But because God is such a unconditionally loving God, he rejoices in that. he not only accepts it, but loves it!

That's a fun image to me :)