The Bakery Theory

A friend of mine has what she calls “The Bakery Theory.”

Here’s the theory. Every girl should go into the bakery knowing what she wants. If you go into the bakery without any idea of what kind of cake or pie or whatever you want, you’re going to run from pie to cake to cheesecake to doughnut to who knows what else looking and waiting for that perfect dessert that we all long for, but we know just doesn’t exist.

You should go in with some kind of idea of what you want ahead of time. This will save a lot of time running around the store window shopping. If you want a piece of oreo pie, you should go for the oreo pie. However, you cannot ignore every other piece of cake or pie or whatever else in the store just because you want the oreo pie. By being super-focused on the oreo pie you may miss a killer piece of strawberry cheesecake that was made just for you. But that doesn’t mean that you should just forget about the oreo pie once you’ve seen the strawberry cheesecake.

So this brings up the question, what do you do when some other woman has your oreo pie or strawberry cheesecake? I suppose that depends on how “taken” your pie or cheesecake is. Does the other woman have the cheesecake in the cart and is headed up to the check out? Did she special order the cheesecake and just has to come and get it (I’d like to know where this is available, if anyone has any ideas, please let me know)? Did she run out to her car to grab her purse? Or did she say she was going to go through the store and come back for it later?

If she’s got it in her cart… honey, you gotta’ give that cheesecake up. Maybe admire it, ask her where she found it, but don’t grab it out of the cart. If she special ordered the cheesecake, it’s not yours and it wasn’t made for you so you wouldn’t necessarily be happy with it anyway. If she’s running out to her car for her purse you still might stand a chance, wait around for a few minutes. If she’s wandering the store, honey, fight for your cheesecake.

You can’t be so afraid of listing the things in oreo pie that you want just because you want to make room for the possibility of cheesecake that you leave your order ticket blank.

The problem is that guys aren’t cheesecake or pie. If you reach the checkout with the cheesecake and you see the pie, you can put the cheesecake back without any repercussions. Not so with a person. That’s not to say that once you’re in a relationship on your way up the aisle you can’t back out. You don’t have to make huge mistake just because it’s so late in the game, but you have to take into account that the pie doesn’t have feelings, and a person does.

We can order a cake that is just to our specifications, once that has our names written on it, and if it doesn’t turn out just right we can give it back and make the bakery fix it. Not so with people. We can’t custom order a guy, and we can’t send him back to fix a mistake in the way he was made. He was fearfully and wonderfully made and while he may have his issues, Lord knows they all do, they’re not all fixable and that’s part of what makes him who he is.

If only life could actually be boiled down to a simple analogy. Something small that parallels perfectly life in all its complexity, make it, just a little simpler to understand.

Susan May Warren

Susan May Warren (SMW) is one of my favorite authors. She has the ability to weave a story in such a way that you believe in the heroines and you fall in love with the heroes. She (almost) always adds that touch of mystery that keeps you guessing through the whole story and she does it all so flawlessly.

I first became really aware of SMW when I read Happily Ever After, a novel about Mona, a woman attempting to open her own bookstore in the town of Deep Haven, MN, and Joe, a handyman of sorts, with a past full of secrets. This book was followed by Tying the Knot, and The Perfect Match, other books in the Deep Haven series. Other single titles, often in compilations as well as more series have followed, such as the Team Hope novels, The Heirs of Anton series (with Susan K. Downs), The Mission: Russia novels, the Josie books, The Noble Legacy and now the PJ Sugar Novels.

Most of her novels are in the third person (he, she, they, etc.) however, in the Josie books Everything’s Coming Up Josie, Chill Out, Josie! and Get Cozy, Josie! she uses the first person, and creates a wonderful example of a Christian Chick Lit series. In Everything’s Coming Up Josie, Josie is a twenty-something young woman whose ex-boyfriend just married her sister and whose best friend is getting married to some woman she doesn’t even know. What’s a girl to do but join up with a one year English teaching program in Russia? When reading this book I kept thinking, when did SMW get a look into my life, from the TV shows that I watch (such as Lost) to jokes that my family makes (“Anybody want a peanut” from The Princess Bride) and to Josie’s feelings as a single Christian woman, I felt like I could relate to her in such an incredible way.

One of my favorites of hers (though it is incredibly hard to pick just one) is In Sheep’s Clothing, the first book in the Mission: Russia series. In Sheep’s Clothing is about Gracie, a young woman who has spent the past year or two as a missionary in Russia, and is now headed home to the United States. But before she can leave some good friends of hers are killed and the local police force has reason to believe that she may have the answers they need to solve the case. So they send Vicktor after her. Sparks fly as Gracie and Vicktor fight with one another, the bad guys who are after Gracie, and their growing feelings for one another (Careful, or you might find yourself falling for Vicktor as well).

The link to SMW’s website is in the “places I like to go” section if you’re interested in reading more from and about this great author.