My wife, Susie, and I have been reading through a book by Bob Goff entitled “Love Does.” Bob shares stories from his life, and in chapter eight he tells about getting married to “Sweet Maria.”
Money was an issue. Bob writes that he had about $3.00 to spend on each person coming to the wedding. They didn’t get many flowers, but got lots of balloons. They found a caterer who felt sorry for them. He gave them some food cheap, but the cake was going to be a problem. Through someone who knew someone that owned a bakery, they settled on $150.00 for a four-story wedding cake.
The wedding went as weddings go, and off to the reception they went! The caterer went the extra mile to make the display of food look like a feast when it was mostly pasta salad. As Bob and Sweet Maria arrived, they could see that a young man was arriving with the four-story wedding cake. Bob thought it was strange that he was assembling the cake in the parking lot on an AV cart. He was putting all the pillars in place and got the bride and groom ornaments just right. It was all set until the young man started wheeling the cart through the parking lot. The left wheel hit a small rock and the cake toppled over one layer after another.
When we got to this part in the story, I cringed. I saw this happen at a wedding reception not too long ago. I thought I was seeing things. The cake seemed to be leaning to one side. I blinked a couple of times to make sure I saw what I saw. It leaned in slow motion until the top half descended to the floor. I was too far away to do anything.
You would think that the cake was lost, but this is where the story gets hard to swallow. Bob had the young man take the broken pieces of the cake back to the bakery and put them back together using icing as the glue that would hold it together, gravel, asphalt, dirt, and all!!! It was hard to swallow, literally.
True story with a truth few people can salvage. Bob writes, “Like that cake, my life is full of small rocks, pieces of asphalt, broken and unrepaired relationships, and unwanted debris, but somehow God allows us each to be served up anyway. . . Jesus seemed to say that all we would need to do is to scrape together the pieces of our lives that had fallen on the ground, bring those pieces to Him, and He would start using them.”
Friend, in spite of the grit and faults and failures in our lives, Jesus has decided to move you from the parking lot to the party. Jesus once said, “With men this is impossible, but not with God. With God, all things are possible.”