Every time my life, or the life of someone I love, gets so messed up that there appears to be no way out, I think of Edith’s goo.

In The Letters of Francis Schaeffer Dr. Schaeffer tells the story of a young woman who came to the L’Abri study center (French for “shelter”). I imagine she was searching for her identity, since that's why most young people went there.

Money was tight, so everyone had to work. The young woman was given the assignment to make cakes in the kitchen. But since she had little experience cooking, she soon had what Francis Schaeffer described as a "mess of goo."

Under normal circumstances, the goo would have been tossed. But money was an issue, and Edith Schaeffer was very economical in the kitchen. She sat down with the girl and figured out exactly what was in the gob of goo, added an extra ingredient, and made what Francis Schaeffer described as "the most marvelous noodles you have tasted in your life."

I think about this story all the time – just about every day, because it's so clearly illustrates how God’s grace works in our lives day to day. We try a little of this, we try a little of that, and we end up with what we think is a big gob of goo.

But God never wastes anything. What looks like a big gob of goo to us to him looks like the ingredients of something great. In his grace, he adds the missing ingredient, and the result is something fantastic.