Corn Pancakes and Frustration

I love the corn pancakes at Maria’s Café. So today when I had a little extra time at home and some Iowa-grown corn in the fridge, I had the inspiration of finding a similar recipe to make for lunch.

A few searches online and I found exactly what I was looking for. The author of the recipe even referenced the fabulous corn pancakes of Maria’s Café, so I knew I had hit the nail on the head.

Corn, flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, pinch of salt. All the basic ingredients you would expect. I blended them up and dropped the first spoonfuls on my hot griddle with eager expectation.

My impatience got the better of me, and I tried to flip the first pancake a little too soon. A spoonful of corn goo adhered to my spatula. A brown crust remained stuck on the griddle. And no sign of actual cake-ness was evident. That was when I had an inkling that these pancakes might not be as easy as your typical Aunt Jemima’s Buttermilk.

I tried a wide variety of other spatulas, thinking that a thinner model might slide more smoothly beneath the golden cakes. Goo. All goo.

I scrubbed all the spatulas and decided the griddle was probably the problem. I switched to a newer pan, added a touch of butter to grease the skids (so to speak), and now made only one pancake at a time, so as to optimally assess its flipping time.

Still no dice. A very thin golden layer would crumple up as I scooped, but no baking, no rising, just a big lump of corn goo.

I decided that some additional flour might be just the ticket. This proved more promising, as (for the first time) I was able to flip the pancake and maintain a circular form. But still, despite lovely golden, crusty edges, the middle was goo.

I added further flour (and my husband came into the kitchen, intrigued by the conundrum. And probably hungry). We let the pancakes cook longer on both sides, until it seemed impossible to consider goo still remaining in the middle.

Ben cut up the latest version and ate it with butter and syrup. “Good!” he said. “The center is just as gooey as the others, but the flavor is nice.”

My afternoon was pretty well shot, and my patience for these little corn cakes had run out. I ate a bagel and stuck the rest of the batter in the fridge (the optimist in me, I guess).

Frustrated. I don’t like wasting food, I don’t like wasting time, and this was a combo platter of both.

And my mind turned to our friends who are serving the Lord in Thailand. We got to skype with them this morning, and their story today was a string of questions, interruptions, disappointments in ministry, and waiting to see how God was going to work for good in their messy relational endeavors. Were they failing? Was their work just a big waste of time and energy?

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body (2 Corinthians 4:8-10).

Paul, I think, grappled with the same kind of puzzle. From the outside, they were afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, and dying like Jesus. But he didn’t label that “failure.”

Rather, he exulted.

For this slight, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things which are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).

There’s a lesson for me, I think. My craving for immediate gratification and happy endings to the short chapters of my life are not always God’s way. He uses the things that I would label failure, worthless, a waste for a long-distance glory of unfathomable value.

May we learn to wait and hope in Him.