God’s Cornbread Pan

When I originally wrote this it was for myself, I didn’t know then how true it was going to become. It is the way I feel this moment in time, I am God’s Cornbread Pan, perhaps you are one also?

It’s so old that I don’t ever remember it not being in the kitchen, it was my mother’s before it was mine. It is heavy, the outside has blackened from years of use over gas flames, but the inside of that pan is slick, seasoned perfect for making my cornbread. I have a coffee mug, bought, while on a very wonderful vacation with my children, at the Disney Brown Derby Restaurant. It is my favorite mug and my morning coffee does not taste the same from any other cup. There is an over-sized tee shirt, old and sporting some thin places, definitely ugly, but it is my favorite sleepwear. There are some letters from the far past that I have put away and carefully take out occasionally to read. I own several Bibles, but my favorite is my old Annotated Dake with its pages are worn and coming apart, but that Bible always knows exactly where to open anytime I reach for it.

What is my point? These old, ugly, worn items make me feel good, comfort me, work when I need them to work. Everyone in the house knows that there are two things you don’t touch, they are the scissors I cut hair with, and my cornbread pan. I have a set of Rachel Ray pans, orange handles, soft to the touch, bright and shiny, but when I make cornbread I reach for the old pan. The reason this is important to me is that sometimes I feel like the most ragged, ugly, useless person in God’s Army. I feel I am the one that is put under the cabinet to hide when company comes over, like my cornbread pan. No matter how ugly it is, if I want to make a pan of bread I reach under the stove, turn the flame on under it, bringing it to the point that when I pour the batter in, it immediately sizzles and browns the bottom so that when I slice it, it will slide right out without sticking to the sides! Looking at the men Jesus chose to walk with Him I think they all look more like cornbread pans than shiny new cookware.

1 Corinthians 1:26-31 Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.” King James says it this way: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

I don’t mind being the old, ugly, blackened pan that is hidden from public view, if when God wants to do something special, He will reach under the cabinet and use me, knowing that everything I have gone through in this life has made me seasoned and ready for use. I want Him to be able to count on me, to know that I can take the heat and serve up whatever He wants me to do.

What better calling in life than to be God’s cornbread pan? Can’t think of anything right this minute!