Your unique recipe...

1/2 lb. butter, 6 eggs, 3 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, and 1 tsp. vanilla....
That's the basic recipe to make pretty much any type of pound cake.  Look in any cookbook and chances are you will find these 5 ingredients (with maybe a slight variation of the amounts).  However, whenever you add one additional ingredient -- say, cream cheese, or coconut, or sour cream -- you have a completely different cake.  Yes, chances are it still looks similar (unless you bake like I do and every cake turns our looking different), but when you slice it and take a bite each additional ingredient changes the flavor or texture just enough to make it unique...not just a plain pound cake.
That's an analogy I was hit with over the past couple of days during my baking marathon.  I have cake #5 baking in the oven right now (with 10 to go) and although I've used the same ingredients for all of the first 4, they have all come out looking slightly different -- just like we are!  We are all human...we are wives...moms...daughters...sisters...WOMEN!  We are all basically made of the same ingredients (when you get down to the biology of it).  We were all formed in our mother's womb -- fearfully and wonderfully made --- but it's those ADDITIONAL INGREDIENTS that makes us all slightly unique. It makes us who we are...our hair color, our waste size, our love of pets, our  personality...all that we are not the same as anyone around us.  Just adding one ingredient to our life has altered who we have become and who we are becoming.
It's so easy to look at the circumstances of our life and resent situations that have happened.  Maybe we have been hurt by friends, family or a spouse...maybe we've experienced loss that seems unbearable...maybe abuse has forever changed our perception of those around us.  There are so many ingredients that are constantly being added to our basic make-up.  But, here's the cool thing about each finished product...  Just like my cakes where each ingredient just makes my basic recipe a better cake -- every life experience you have walked through or are walking through is making you a better person. It's making you a better wife, mom, daughter or sister.  It's making you stronger and pointing you to a dependence on the Master Baker...our Creator.  None of us are perfect and we don't live perfect lives but if we allow him to use our additional ingredients for HIS glory then there is no doubt that the finished product will always be better than the basic recipe.
Be YOU!  Be an original!  Be all HE has designed YOU to be!!!