It’s a great idea! Warm cookies right out of the oven with ice cold milk. I’ll just pre-heat the oven. Mmmm… the cookie dough tastes good even before its baked. Man did I have a bad day today. Oh look! Entertainment Tonight is on. Just one more bite. I’ll make a half batch.  The oven is beeping and the cookie dough is gone. You might as well turn the oven off. Have any of you ever done that? It happens so quickly it’s over before you knew it! There are logical reasons something like that happens. We get distracted. Sometimes our restless mind is like a pin ball machine. Ping, ping, ping! We are mentally bombarded by a million things at once. Sometimes we are just impatient. We live in a, “Give it to me now,” world. And sometimes we are just depressed, trying to fill a void. Then we beat ourselves up with negative self talk because we really didn’t mean to do it.

 

You know life is the same way. We know what we want to do but then we do the very thing we are resisting.  Romans 7:15 says, “I don’t understand what I do. For what I want to do, I don’t do, but what I hate to do, I do!” Mistakes distract us and we dwell on them which is the worst thing we can do! In his book, Failing Forward, John Maxwell says, “Errors become mistakes when we perceive them incorrectly. Mistakes become failures when we continually respond to them incorrectly.” We cannot camp out in, “Pity Party Land.” We must accept the mistake and move forward. A great quote by Sophia Bedford Pierce states, “It is difficult to see things clearly if the shadow of doubt diminishes the light entering your eyes.”

 

So when we make a mistake, we must, “ACT.” Jerome Bruno states, “You are more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” With these letters A stands for, “Accept.” Accept that you goofed. C stands for, “Create.” Create an opportunity to do something for someone else. This step most always pulls you out of feeling bad or feeling sorry for yourself. And T stands, for, “Take.” Take it easy on yourself. In Joan Lunden’s Book, “A Bend in the Road is Not the End of the Road,” she says, “Stress clouds our ability to think and act. Accessing my inner calm and taking time out, frees me up to create solutions.

 

We mess up sometimes. That’s the way the cookie crumbles! So turn the oven back on and make a fresh batch of white chocolate, macadamia nut cookies. And don’t forget the milk! It does the body good!