Baked Crayons

This weekend I had a little bit of extra time with my girls, which I love, love, love!! So we decided to do some fun crafts. As I was digging around in the craft tubs looking for supplies I found tons of broken, half used, old crayons and I figured we might as well find something useful to do with them. I collected all the old crayons I could find and when the girls got home from school we went outside and peeled the paper off all of them. This took quite a while and was a little messy ( I think I still have crayon under my fingernails), but we got that done so we could move on to the more exciting part. We broke the crayons into little pieces and placed them in muffin pans then put them in the oven. After a few minutes we had liquid crayons, which was pretty neat looking. These had to cool, then we popped them out and had brand new, multi-hued crayon muffins.

I might be weird, but everything is a teachable moment for me, all the time I see things and think of what I could learn from it or how I could use that to teach someone else. Crayon muffins are no different. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says," Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" Before we let Jesus into our lives we are just like those cruddy, broken crayons; not much use to anyone. But when we accept Jesus's love and forgiveness he starts to work on us. He will probably have to peel some junk out of our lives, junk like hatred, doubt, selfishness, things that were in our hearts, blocking Jesus from having full access. This is messy work, but God wants what is best for us so He is willing to stick with us through this process, no matter how long it takes. After this the real transformation begins, Jesus is working in you to make you a new creation, some one useful and cool! These changes can be brought about in many different ways, but it often takes some hard decisions, uncomfortable situations and maybe even something very difficult. I don't think God necessarily cause hardship, life is just hard, but He will use ANYTHING to bring you closer to being who He created you to be. These kinds of things are like the crayons getting broken and stuck in the hot oven. The crayons may not have appreciated what we were doing to them, but we knew the end result; the useful, beautiful final product! There have been times in my life when I did not appreciate what God was doing in me or what was happening around me, but after I see the results I am always so thankful that God cares enough about me to teach me and shape me into someone more useful! Being a follower of Jesus is not easy and becoming a new creation is not an over night transformation, but in the end it is all going be so worth it.

We can choose to be broken crayons floating around in a craft tub of life, never to have a purpose, or we can choose to let Jesus make us something new, something He actually wanted us to be all along, no matter what that entails.

PS. The first picture is our brand new, fun crayon muffins, and the second is the scuffed, broken crayons we started with.