The Icing on the Cake

There is nothing as special as someone baking you a homemade cake! Despite the obvious cost of the ingredients and the electricity to bake it, it carries a value so much more meaningful and valuable, and that is the cost of the person's time, patience and creativity.  My precious cousin Carol recently baked me a granadilla cake for my birthday, a flavour which I had been longing for, for quite some time.  Although the cake was not as airy and fluffy as the recipe was suppose to turn out, it was still delicious in taste, beautiful to look at all decorated with strawberries, and the scrumptious granadilla butter icing made up for its slightly dense imperfection.

It reminded me of how sometimes we too can sometimes feel a little deflated with a kind of heaviness, but if we choose to cover up our feelings with the icing of a smile, we too can be 'tasty and appetising' to all those who we may meet during the day.

So next time we are icing and decorating our faces in the morning, let us also be mindful of clotheing ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, like the Bible tells us to.  Let these be our icing that covers up our own imperfections of grumpiness and/or a heavy heart.  We may not always 'feel' it, but as the saying goes, we should 'fake it till we make it'.  

I can personally testify that when you choose to push down those heavy feelings with a forced smile and conciously think happy thoughts, your heart does eventually catch up with your smiling face! (Unless of course, your brain needs the help of some hormonal chemicals, but that's a whole different story 😉.)