Pastoral Ponderings—A Win for Cookies!

There’s nothing particularly special or artistic about our cookies, but as with the potential magic any Christmas cookie can bear, they carry a spiritual power nonetheless. Nothing fancy about how it works, either—just trying to show how easy it is to be a blessing and build bridges: We baked Christmas cookies like many people do. We even decorated our gingerbread cookies while trying NOT to compare our efforts to the Hallmark movies’ mythology of kids making artwork of cookies in no time flat! Ours turned out somewhere between remarkably ordinary and “that’s nice…”

This is our third year of taking an afternoon to try to deliver cookies to neighbors. So I saw a car in the quiet drive across the street where I’d hardly seen any sign of life across the months, and gave it a try. I knocked on the door, and surprisingly enough, a serious, reserved face showing many years’ wear, met me through the tentatively opened door. I said “hello, neighbor. I haven’t met you yet, but my wife and I wanted to bring you some Christmas cookies.”

The reserved, cautious look instantly melted, and when the eyes of my quiet neighbor whom I hadn’t yet met, landed on the cookies, the huge smile on HIS face was so heartwarming to ME! But that was only the beginning. A few days later we got a knock on the door—rather unusual for our rural location—with my now smiling older neighbor’s daughter stopping by, poinsettia in hand, saying “I’m a night-shift nurse, coming home wishing I had Christmas cookies, but hadn’t the time to make any, but when I got home, there they were!”

We knocked on other doors to no answer, and delivered a few others to more smiles to folks we had met with previous cookie deliveries. But it’s always magical when the cookies build a sweet bridge for the first time!

It’s too early to know whether this brief, simple exchange merely brought a few smiles, or is, as Bogart would say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But does it really matter? He didn’t bite me when I knocked on his door, nobody got hurt and no animals were injured in the process, and whether just a few extra smiles, or the beginnings of God’s doing something special, it was both simple and rewarding.

I’m eager to hear YOUR stories of the magic of cookie ministry—please share! And if you haven’t delivered cookies yet, there’s still time to both be a blessing for others in this simple way, and in the process, add your own smiles to your Christmas season. And it might even start a beautiful friendship… Baking the blessings—Pastor Jim