It was the day of the Thanksgiving Feast, and the Leader was nervous! They had made their plans, they had sent invitations to all the kid’s families, and they had bought the food. Now all that was left was to cook the food and have it all turn out good and all be ready to eat at the same time! So many things could go wrong!
The Leader and the kids met at Church early in the afternoon and immediately went to the Church kitchen. The first two things that needed to be done were: get the eating area ready for the families and make the chocolate pudding. The Leader chose the kids that were good in math to make the pudding and had the rest of the group set up the tables and chairs. Setting up the tables and chairs was easy, but then there was a problem! The kids were going to put the plates, cups, and silverware on the tables, and they found that they had not been washed very well the last time they were used! The kids were going to have to wash the dishes before they used them! The Leader helped them fill the sink with soapy water and they began to wash all those dishes! Suddenly the kids decided to start splashing each other! The kids that were making the chocolate pudding started yelling at the dishwashers and told them that they did not want dishwater in the pudding! The Leader had to calm everyone down and stop the dishwashers from splashing.
Meanwhile the kids making the chocolate pudding were having other problems! The math kids measured the pudding mix and the milk very carefully into the large bowl. The bowl was just big enough to hold all that pudding. The kids began to carefully mix the pudding, and then they saw the problem! The bowl was leaking! Liquid chocolate pudding was coming out of the bottom of the bowl at an alarming rate! There was no other big bowl! The kids did not know what to do, but the Leader ran to the cupboard and found seven smaller bowls. The dishwashers quickly washed and dried those bowls, and the pudding was put into the seven smaller bowls. The bowls did not match and some of the kids were worried that the feast would not look right because the bowls did not match! The Leader assured the kids that mismatched bowls would not make any difference.
The next job that needed to be done was to design the pizzas. The pizza design teams got together, and the Leader gave each team a frozen pizza crust and all the ingredients for the pizzas were laid out on the counter. Each team had a different idea about the best kind of pizza, and they combined different amounts of the various ingredients on their crust to make their perfect pizza. Everything was going great until one of the kids lost their balance and started to fall towards the counter! This caused one of the pizzas to slide to the edge of the counter and start to fall! The kids on the team tried to grab the pizza! First one kid almost caught it, but it slipped out of her hands, and another of the kids tried to catch it, and knocked it across the room! Finally, someone caught the pizza! The crust was saved, but all the sauce and other ingredients had flown off the pizza and landed on the floor, on the counter, and on the other pizzas! All the kids were yelling, and the Leader had a hard time calming everyone down! When everyone had settled down, they cleaned up the ingredients on the floor and on the counter, and they picked off the ingredients that had landed on the other pizzas. Then they all worked together and rebuilt the ruined pizza with fresh ingredients! They put all the pizzas into the refrigerator until it was time to put them into the oven.
The frozen french fries were put onto cookie sheets so that they would be ready to go into the oven. The hotdogs were also put onto cookie sheets, and they were also ready to go into the oven.
While the ovens were warming up, the kids got out the big pot that they were going to use to boil the water for the macaroni. They put the lid on the pot, put it on the stove and lit the burner.
When the ovens were hot enough, the Leader put the pizzas in one oven and the frozen french fries and hot dogs in the other oven. Then the Leader checked the big pot on the stove to see if the water was starting to boil. When he took the lid off the pot, he was in for a big surprise! No one had put water into the pot! Now the macaroni & cheese would not be done on time! The kids thought that they had ruined the feast! The Leader put a lot of water into the pot, put the lid back on the pot, and turned the burner up as high as it could go! There was nothing else to do until the timer rang to let them know that the pizzas, french fries, and hotdogs were ready to be taken out of the ovens. So, the Leader asked the group to gather around so that he could teach them a little more about God.
The Leader told the kids that it had not been easy to prepare the feast. Things had been spilled, dishes had been dirty, a pan had leaked, and no one had put water into the big pot! At times it seemed impossible that the Feast would turn out to be any good at all, but the Leader assured them that the Feast would be good, and that they and their families would enjoy it.
The life of a Believer sometimes seems as crazy and as out of control as their feast preparations had been that day, but God is in charge of the life of each Believer and He promises that everything will turn out right!
In the Bible in Romans 8:28 it says:
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for them.
So, we do not need to worry when things in our life seem out of control and do not make sense. God is in control, and He knows what He is doing. In fact, God tells us not to worry about things in this life, but to give all our worries to Him!
In the Bible in I Peter 5:7 it says:
Give all your worries and cares to God, for He cares about you.
It will all work out fine because God is in control!