Many of the ingredients in a tasty recipe are not good by themselves. They can be pretty disgusting. Life is much the same way:  You can’t judge your life by an event or occurrence but must look at the result of it all blended together.

Try chewing on a mouthful of basil, or sip on an ounce of vanilla extract, or put down a tablespoon of cinnamon (DON’T try those things…it can be dangerous) …flavors that we love in the final product can be anything from annoying to unbearable by themselves.  Such is life.

I’ve always told my sons that if they love their lives now, they must respect and appreciate everything involved to get them to this point; likewise, what is yet to come is also part of making the grand recipe of life. In the present of any circumstance, we cannot know how that affects our future.

What we are and what we have are the summation of experiences (I explain this and provide useful tools to understand your experiences in my LIFElines book). Seemingly minor meetings or occurrences can affect your life immediately or way down the road; traumatic experiences can cause major course corrections to a better life and becoming a better person. We won’t know the effect until life blends it all together, just like we can’t project the taste of the vanilla icing by swigging from the extract bottle.

Be patient with the “recipe” and trust that the “ingredients” of your life are there for a reason: to make you.