The Gift of Seeing

There are bak­ers and there are bak­ers. By this, I mean there are peo­ple who find a great recipe, fol­low it metic­u­lous­ly, and cre­ate a mas­ter­piece, and there are peo­ple who whip things up in the kitchen using some sort of mag­ic and also cre­ate a mas­ter­piece. Some peo­ple intu­itive­ly under­stand how ingre­di­ents work. The rest of us, need some­one to guide us through the process. The mys­tery lies in the gap. Observ­ing the pat­terns, order, and pro­ce­dures for bak­ing is one way to begin to bridge the gap, but until a per­son tru­ly seeks under­stand­ing through instruc­tion, study, and prac­tice, a jump will still be required.

The pat­terns and pro­ce­dures that work togeth­er to make bread rise, cook­ies sweet, and pas­tries fluff, were built into cre­ation by God Him­self. He put that order there and He gave us those pat­terns to hint at the rela­tion­ships behind the result. The strug­gle occurs when we fail to see it. How do we learn to look past the obvi­ous and tru­ly under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing behind the scenes? How do we lever­age the pow­er of creation?

Here are a few things to get us start­ed on our jour­ney from appren­tice to master:

1. See with your eyes : Tru­ly look. Pay atten­tion to the pat­terns that you see all around you. They were put there by the God who made the mag­ic. Prac­tice observ­ing and look­ing for His pat­terns in all areas, not just the one area you hap­pen to like.
2. Learn from the mas­ters : So you need a recipe. Big deal, so did­n’t every chef who came before you. Are you study­ing the recipes well enough to observe the pat­terns, learn how they work, and tweak them?
3. Guess : Guess­ing is a tech­nique that stu­dents are very ner­vous to try, but it’s at the base for almost every great dis­cov­ery ever made. Great math­e­mati­cians dis­cov­ered the­o­rems by guess­ing and play­ing with the results. Great foods, like piz­za, came about by guess­ing and…
4. Per­se­vere : You won’t be an overnight suc­cess. It takes time. Some­times we see things that aren’t there and oth­er times we don’t see or know enough to mas­ter. So we repeat the process, we pay atten­tion, ask a mas­ter, guess, and try again.

This process takes time and can be applied to most every­thing we try in life. Want to mas­ter a new hob­by, job, or pas­time? Chances are you’ll need to work your way through this process. Start by see­ing what you can see, just like the bear who climbed over the moun­tain, and enjoy your journey!