God Provides: A Reflection on How We Co-Create Our Dreams with God
“Sometimes we pray to God for a cake, not realizing that He gives it to us in the form of ingredients.”
I’ve been wanting to move to Germany for so long, and now that I’m actually here, it feels surreal.
So many times in our lives we go through moments that were once dreams without realizing or acknowledging that they are what they are. And I guess that’s the importance of talking to God, not just during low points in life, but most especially when life is doing well, to express gratitude.
I read in several posts online that when we pray to God for a cake, He gives it in the form of ingredients and baking tools — flour, eggs, milk, a mixer, etc. It is up to us to assemble this, to co-create the cake we prayed for with God using these gifts.
However, we tend to overlook all the ingredients that God sends us because we are much too focused on the specific finished results that we prayed for; complete healing of a family member, for example, or a certain award or job.
It’s so easy to miss all these little ingredients, often in the form of ordinary things at unpredictable times, unless we actively seek them out and recognize them as parts of a whole.
Using this analogy, the cake I asked for in 2019 was to live and work abroad. I applied for so many jobs but I kept getting rejected. It was God’s way of saying, “Not yet, I am still growing some wheat for your flour, and we have to wait for the chickens to lay eggs.”
Then the pandemic lockdown happened and I felt upset that my “prime years” were wasting away at home.
God’s impeccable timing unfolded though over the next four years, presenting divine ingredients in the form of opportunities to grow my career, ample time for self-reflection, mentors and friends I met, and funds I was able to accumulate, among others.
These ingredients helped me choose schools to apply to and eventually get accepted into one, and now I am here, taking my Masters and opening a new door of opportunities to work in Germany.
Of course, there are more cakes that I’ve prayed for like running my own startup, but keeping this analogy in mind helps me seek out the little ingredients that God drops so subtly into my days. Perhaps it could be a classmate who shares the same values as me, or maybe an event that rekindles some old, neglected interest of mine. With this lens, it’s easier to see everything as an intentional blessing from God — a manifestation of God in All Things.
God provides us with ingredients for the cake He believes we need. In my case, I feel fortunate that God willed for me something I genuinely desired (or rather, that I learned to desire what He has willed for me).
Although I desired something slightly different — getting a job in a Berlin startup instead of being a working student in Frankfurt — God has provided me with so much already that I’d be grateful for whatever cake He makes with me in the end.
With all of these undeserved gifts that God has given me through the years, it is only right that I share this cake we made with others. I pray that I could also be an ingredient in other people’s cakes in any way I can, God-willing, as a way of paying it forward.
What a privilege it is to see God at work and co-create with Him. For this, I am extremely grateful and I will do my best to make sure His gifts do not go to waste.
