Motivation?

“What are you doing?” I screeched at my husband. “You’re ruining the cake!” I had just put down the phone to realize he was carrying the three small bags of groceries with the cake we had bought for our church fellowship slipped sideways in the bag. I could see the layer was askew on the base, with frosting all over the inside of the plastic dome. Closer inspection showed it must have been upside down, since exactly half the frosting was peeled back, now stuck to the top of the container, and stripping bare that half of the cake top. “Just like a man,” I fumed. The phone had rung inside my purse just as we were loading the groceries, and I talked to my daughter until we’d come into the house.

We had stopped at the store to get cream cheese for a spread I was making with some special herbs we had at home to serve with crackers. I was pondering that it would be a skimpy snack contribution tonight, when I saw the beautiful single-layer bakery cakes with the luscious-looking chocolate frosting at a tiny price. I guessed we would have to keep the now-spoiled cake for ourselves, and I went to work on the cracker tray, using the grapes we had bought to fill it out a bit. I repaired the cake as best I could, shoving it in the fridge, and went to sit down and settle my nerves.

When it was time to go, I looked at the cake, now firmed up and looking better, and it occurred to me to slice it up and see how it looked. I got out a pretty cake stand, overlapping the wedges of cake on top, and it didn’t look half bad. The red swirls in the chocolate of the re-cycled icing were less evident with focus on the glistening dark cake. I couldn’t believe it when it was met with oohs and aahs as I uncovered it at church. I had already smoothed things out with my husband over my outburst, but now I was really ashamed as I remembered his crest-fallen look at my scolding. And over such a little thing, really.

During our round-table discussion at a kind of free-for-all where we were invited to ask questions prior to our lesson, our pastor’s wife brought up a question about our school supply giveaway we’d had during the summer. She had run into one of the volunteer beauticians who had helped with the free haircuts, and asked how she felt about the experience, remembering how she had built it up as such a rewarding thing to participate in such an event. The young woman told her she didn’t know if she would do it again, as she was turned off by the shabby treatment the hairdressers received from some of the recipients’ parents, and the sense of entitlement she noticed among them. Pastor’s wife wanted feedback from our workers of what they’d picked up, which was largely different from the haircutter’s report.

I thought about our motivation for doing things for others. Is it for self-gratification? If so, we are often disappointed. The Bible tells us that whatever we do, we are to do it as unto the Lord, Colossians 3:23. It is hard to expect nothing in return for our efforts, but even Jesus was, and still is, mostly rejected and unappreciated. Some day all of our works will be judged, and many will be burned up as worthless, depending upon whether they were built on the proper foundation, and perhaps, even on the motivation behind them. Food for thought.