Overbaked life cookies

I'm so glad I get to teach Activity Days! It's really where all my best stories come from. And I sure love these kids.

A couple of months ago, I was making cookies with my kids, and someone didn't want to follow the recipe. (Not me.) The gospel analogies started to flow, and eventually it turned into a pretty hilarious activity.

We arrived and I plunked down the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies on the counter. I gave them bowls, told them we were making cookies tonight, and said go. They looked at me expectantly. Finally someone signed, "Where's the list?"

"Oh, you don't get one."

Blank looks while it sinks in...

Lillian, as the only girl, and the most experienced baker, overcomes her worries first and grabs some butter. She bravely unwraps it...

I start overhearing comments like, "Do you think 1 or two eggs?" "Maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons of sugar?" I, of course, sign all these so everyone can enjoy the funny things they're saying. After a bit, everyone has something. "Taste mine for me." What - you're afraid to taste your own? Yeah, I am too...

They all looked more like cake batter than cookies. And they all tasted more like paste than cookies. Everyone adds more stuff. Mostly sugar and butter. "Guys, try butter! It's like magic!"

Ready to go in the oven! Specimen one looks like cookie dough with about 5 chocolate chips in it. Specimen 2 looks like muffin batter. Specimen 3 looks like pancake batter. Specimen 1 goes in the oven for 20 minutes. Specimen 2 for 5 minutes. Specimen 3 for 10 minutes.

Specimen 1 came out over-baked, but tasted like (crispy) cookies. Good job! Specimen 2 tasted like sweet bread. Specimen 3 tasted like really thin sweet bread. Not bad for making it up yourself :)

While we ate the cookies, we talked about how life is like cookies - we can try to figure it out ourselves, or we can follow a recipe. The gospel is God's recipe for the best kind of life cookies. And of course, we talked about how when we mess up, we can fix our life cookies through repentance.

The kids were all really proud of themselves for figuring out how to make cookies by themselves (of course, they had all the right ingredients pre-selected for them...they might not have done so well if they'd had to guess all the ingredients!) But I think they recognized that it would have been even tastier with a recipe - and even more so with life!