Marriage is like baking a cake, by Sarah Wickham

For the time that we lived in a house with a useless oven that an owner (not us) wouldn’t fix properly, I was not able to make birthday cakes.  I’m not much of a baker, so it wasn’t really much of a hardship – but birthday cakes, well, it’s a special occasion and I didn’t want my family to miss out on a homemade birthday cake.

Finding the undecorated cakes at the local grocery shop was just the answer for me and in fact it was liberating for me for now I did not have to waste all that energy and thought time on making the cake. Instead, I had more time to consider how I would decorate those cakes, or cupcakes. I was able to do the fun stuff, and not the boring work of making the cake and doing the dishes from making the cake (actually, Steve did the dishes – still it was a chore to get done). Actually, I’m quite enjoying decorating cakes – that I may not bake another cake, maybe.

I recently discovered a Facebook group dedicated to showing off people’s creations made using these pre-made plain cakes from the grocery shops, and no doubt there’s other groups that do the same thing.  It’s now a thing!

But marriage is not like this.

No one else can bake your marriage cake.  Wise counsellors can assist with the selection of ingredients and perhaps help with working out the method, if you’ll let them.  And it might be necessary to have the assistance of a counsellor or other professional to help if certain ingredients are having a problem mixing together.  But you and your spouse have to do the work – no one else can do it for you; you and your spouse have go through the fire. 

It is not until the cake is properly cooked AND cooled that you can finally put the tasty icing or butter cream on it and enjoy it – the bits of the cake that are really satisfying.

So what ingredients do you need in a relationship. Well, consider your marriage vows for starters – what did you promise your spouse that YOU would do.

Then perhaps consider Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance [patience], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

Can you say that you are ALL these things, ALL the time?

And when it’s not working out, because there will be plenty of times when it doesn’t, an important ingredient is the humility to do the work of “getting the log out of your own eye,” (Matthew 7:1-5) to understand what just happened and to say sorry. But not just say sorry, but to also to forgive.

It all takes time, effort and perseverance.

If we only had to ice our cakes life would be so easy. If only marriage was just about the tasty bits. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) we have to mix and bake our marriages from scratch.