Christmas Cookies and Crazy Rantings

I baked today. Yummy Sugar cookies. Here's the recipe:

Kelly's Super Yummy Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
4 1/2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg, milk and vanilla. Beat well. Stir in flour, baking powder, and salt. Blend well. Divide dough into 4 or 5 big balls. Cover and chill one hour.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Roll one ball of dough out on a floured surface. Cut into awesome cool christmassy shapes. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 6-8 minutes or until edges begin to turn golden. Continue with the remaining dough.

This isn't like pie pastry, you can re-roll it as many times as you need to in order to use up all the dough. Depending on the size of your cookies, these will make 6 to 8 dozen cookies.

Yummy cookie frosting! Yippie.

Stir together until smooth:

2 tbsp melted butter
3 tbsp milk
1 tbsp corn syrup
2 cups icing sugar

Spread on cooled cookies, and sprinkle with desired sprinkles while the frosting is still soft.

ENJOY!!! and let me know what you think!


Now on to my crazy rantings....

I love Christmas music. I've been listening to it since September. Last week I got a new Christmas CD and it contains a version of the song The Christmas Shoes. I'm sure you've heard it...it's the heart wrenching tale of a young boy who wants to buy some pretty Christmas shoes for his dying mum. It's a really touching song.

The line that always get me is "I want her to look beautiful if mommy meets Jesus tonight." If I'm not already crying by the time that line comes along, bring on the Kleenex!

But something occurred to me when listening to it recently. Now, I don't want to ruin this song for you...it's still a great song: but i have a bone to pick with the schmo who wrote it.
At the end of the song, after this heart breaking tale, the singer says "I knew that God had sent that little boy, To remind me just what Christmas is all about."

Excuse me?

So this is about you, is it?

God, the Almighty, the Powerful, the Perfect, needs to put a little family through misery in order to get you in the Christmas spirit???

Here's a thought: maybe not everything that happens in your little sphere has to do with you.

I think sometimes we are so eager to believe that everything happens for a reason (and i don't doubt it does) that we just assume that WE are that reason. We don't want to walk away from any sad event without an excuse on hand for why God would allow it. So...we assume God is teaching US something.... at least then God has an excuse, right?

But God doesn't need any excuses. And God doesn't always let us in on why He does what He does. And not everything that happens in our line of sight is about us. And...here's the biggie....when we can't make sense of it ourselves, we need to trust that He knows what He's doing.

End of Rant. Go bake some cookies. :)