Life and Cooking

After tasting her friends fantastic lemon pie, a woman asked her friend for the recipe and the friend graciously gave it to her. But when the woman made the pie it tasted nothing like the delicious pie she had eaten at her friend’s house. “She must have left out some ingredients so I couldn’t duplicate her good cooking,” the woman thought. That thought troubled her so much that at last she confronted the friend with her accusation.

The friend denied leaving anything out and calmly went over the recipe. “It calls for real butter, did you use that?”

“No,” answered the woman. “I never use real butter, it’s too expensive. I used margarine.”

“And it calls for the juice of real lemons, did you use that?”

“No,” answered the woman. “Lemons go bad before I can get them used up so I always have bottled lemon juice on hand to use.”

“Well, that is the problem,” said the woman. “There’s nothing left out of the recipe, you just didn’t follow the recipe.”

There is a lesson in this story for all of us. We have been commanded to be obedient to the laws of God and in return God will bless us. But as we live our lives we often rationalize ourselves out of doing exactly what we have been told to do, and then we blame God for not blessing us. But God has said, “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise” (D&C 82:10). Exactness is an important part of cooking and an important part of living the gospel.