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One year ago, almost to the day, I sat down and wrote about cookies.
Except I wasn’t really writing about cookies. I was writing about my daughter.
It was episode 669, “Back Into the Oven,” and it turned out to be a listener favorite. At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe based on the messages that came in about it. The premise was simple. We all mature at different rates on different things, and just like a good batch of cookies, sometimes we need more time in the oven to become what we’re meant to be. You don’t throw the batch out. You give it more heat and more time.
Well, the oven timer has gone off. It’s time to see how the cookies turned out.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #710, “Fresh Baked.” I’m Darrell Darnell, data shows the average American eats between 200 and 300 cookies annually. With about 95% of U.S. households consuming cookies, and roughly 20 cookies in a pound, that works out to something like 10 to 15 pounds of cookies per person every single year, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. But I can absolutely put down some cookies. So I’m probably guilty of keeping that average up all by myself.
That episode last year was a fun one to write, and also a hard one. I talked about the trips Addi and I have taken to Chicago and the way her heart breaks for people living on the street. Not in a performative way but in a way where she notices them when the rest of us have trained ourselves to look past them.
And then I talked about the other side of it. How she decided on her own to take a gap year after high school. How that gap year turned into a season where she wasn’t working much and she wasn’t in school either, and we were going round and round with her about it. It was a frustrating time for our whole house with conversations at the kitchen table that ended with nobody feeling good.
What I didn’t fully appreciate while I was typing that episode was that Addi was already stepping into something new. She had been teaching at the mother’s day out program our church runs, and she’d been offered a position as the kids ministry intern. The schedules wouldn’t allow both, so after a lot of prayer, and after asking us and a bunch of other people for advice, she chose the internship.
She was on day three of that job the day I wrote episode 669. The internship ran from last August through May of this year, and it delivered lessons to everybody under our roof, not just her.
Let me tell you something about my daughter. Addi is great with kids. It’s not something she worked up, it’s a gifting. And it comes with an instinct for classroom management that I genuinely do not understand, because she has never taken a class on it, never read a book about it, never had one minute of formal training.
I’ve watched a room full of children come completely unglued. I’ve watched adults step in, adults with more years and more experience, mothers who have raised their own kids, and I’ve watched those kids run right over them. And then Addi walks in. Same kids. Same chaos. And within a minute or two, the room is calm and everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing.
And she’s adored. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking through the hallway at church and a parent I have never met in my life stops me to tell me how much their child loves Addi and how much they love her too.
As the year went on, they kept handing her more. Classrooms, planning, directing from stage, singing, teaching, leadership meetings, staff meetings. By spring she had her hands in nearly every part of kids ministry at our church.
But it wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows.
At one point in that internship, she was put on probation.
I never fully understood what led to it. And I’m still not sure whether that’s because Addi didn’t tell me everything, or because she didn’t entirely understand it herself. Probably some of both.
What I do know is this. Once they sat her down and the probation period started, she had two roads in front of her.
She could change nothing. She could tell everyone how unfair it was. She could talk about how nobody appreciated her, how they were picking on her, how she was the one being wronged here. She could play the victim, and I promise you she would have found people willing to agree with her. That road almost certainly ended with her being dismissed.
Or she could sit with the hard feedback, actually hear it, look inside herself, work on the things they named, and grow up a little in the process. That road probably ended with her keeping the internship.
Only the kids ministry director could give you a full report card on how she did. But I can tell you what I watched from my seat at home. She took it seriously. She looked inward instead of outward. She kept a good attitude in a situation that would have made a lot of us bitter.
She finished probation. And she stayed all the way to the end of the internship. That was a moment, not of the cookie coming out done, but the heat being turned up. And she responded wonderfully.
As spring arrived and the end of the internship started rushing toward her, Addi began thinking about what came next.
And she did something that told me more about her growth than anything else that year. She started asking questions. She talked to the other interns at our campus and to other people her age. She asked them about their long term plans. Their goals. What they were studying and why.
She was gathering information. On her own. Nobody assigned it.
Eventually she came to Kari and me and told us she wanted to enroll in college.
She laid it out. After mother’s day out. After the internship. After all those classrooms and all those parents in the hallway and all those conversations with her peers, she had come to a conclusion about herself. She had a gifting for children. She had a passion for ministry. And she had already identified a private Christian university she wanted to attend and had started the application process.
Kari and I sat there with about six emotions running at once.
Because everything she was saying made sense. All of it. She IS naturally gifted with kids, and a career in early childhood education is a perfect fit for who God made her to be. The ministry piece caught us off guard, I’ll admit that. But it was the best kind of surprise.
Here’s what I learned.
Let me read you something. This is what I wrote one year ago, right after the “here’s what I learned” break in episode 669:
Addi has not matured at the rate I would have preferred. I would have preferred she had come out of high school with the same eagerness to work and possess the same ambition that she now has. At the same time, she has had maturity well beyond her years in other aspects of her life, such as the way she has always cared for the homeless.
It is easy to look at others: kids, other relatives, co-workers, and colleagues and see those things that we most want them to change. I started this podcast by saying that Addi is not the same person she once was. She’s not. She’s better.
Sometimes when you’re baking cookies, you pull the batch out of the oven and they aren’t quite ready. When that happens, what do you do? Do you get mad at them, tell them how awful they are, and give up on them? Of course not. You stick them back in the oven and carefully attend to them until they’ve baked just the right amount of time.
I read that now and I want to reach back through the calendar and tell that guy to hang on, because he has no idea what’s about to happen.
In episode 667, I told you about a frustrating stretch in our family a couple of years back. Our church has a Tuesday night service just for young adults, and Kari and I were encouraging Addi and her brother to go. They both refused. Flat out. And when Addi started that internship, she was still refusing.
Somewhere in the middle of this year, that changed. Nobody nagged her into it. On her own, in her own time, she decided to go check it out.
Now she won’t miss it.
As I’m writing this, she just turned down a chance to go see the new Spiderman movie with her brother and me, because going would have meant missing Tuesday night service. I want you to understand what that means to me. A couple of years ago I couldn’t get her in the building. Now I can’t get her out of it.
There’s more. She’s part of a Monday night Bible study for young women, and that group voted her in as one of their co-leaders. The other day I stuck my head in her room just to check on her, and there she was on her bed, Bible open, study materials spread out all over the place, working ahead on next week’s lesson.
Nobody told her to do that. Nobody was watching.
Three years ago my daughter was walking a road that kept me awake at night. Staring at the ceiling. Praying prayers I didn’t have good words for. And now she’s growing spiritually faster than I’ve ever seen before.
Next week she steps onto a college campus and starts working toward her degree. And she didn’t just apply. She got accepted. She earned scholarships. She qualified for grants. She’s on her way to an excellent degree from a school I would have told you a year ago was financially out of reach for our family.
She might be the oldest freshman on that campus. And she is wearing that like a badge of honor, which honestly might be my favorite part of the whole thing.
Now let’s be clear about what’s coming. She’s going to hit walls she didn’t see. There will be a night where she wonders if she’s smart enough, capable enough, strong enough to finish. There will be a semester that grinds her down. That’s not failure. That’s called life. That’s part of adulting.
But here’s what a year taught me, and I want to say this carefully, because I think somebody needs it today.
Seasons bring clarity. Seasons bring confidence. Seasons bring connection. And seasons bring courage.
Clarity, because you cannot think your way into knowing who you are. You have to live your way there. Addi didn’t discover her calling by sitting in her room weighing options. She discovered it in a loud classroom, on a stage, in a hallway, in a hard meeting where somebody told her the truth.
Confidence, because confidence isn’t something you’re handed. It’s residue. It’s what’s left on you after you survive something.
Connection, because the people she met in that season, the interns and the leaders and the young women in that Monday night group, they became the ones pointing her toward a future she couldn’t see on her own.
And courage. Courage is the one that gets me. Because courage is the only one of the four she had to manufacture herself. Nobody could do that part for her. When they sat her down and put her on probation, courage was the decision to stay in the room, take the notes, and go to work instead of running out the door with a story about how unfair it all was.
So let me talk to three different people for a second.
If you’re a parent right now, staring at a kid who is not where you hoped they’d be, and you’re doing the math on how far behind they are: stop doing that math. It’s the wrong math. You are looking at a batch that isn’t finished, and not finished is not the same thing as ruined. Slow is not wasted. Your job isn’t to yank them out and declare the results. Your job is to keep the heat steady and stay close to the oven door.
If you’re the one who feels like the undercooked batch, if you’ve got a couple of years behind you that look like nothing but bad choices and lost time, hear me. You are not a failed attempt. You are not too late. Addi may be the oldest freshman on that campus, and she is walking in there with her head up, because the gap year that everybody worried about is exactly what taught her what she was made for. That time was not thrown away. It was invested. The detour was the road.
And if you’re neither one of those people, you’re still in an oven somewhere. Everybody is. There is some season you’re sitting in right now that feels pointless, uncomfortable, and way too long. So let me ask you the only question that matters: what if the heat that feels like it’s ruining you is actually the heat that’s making you?
The batch that comes out too soon looks fine on top and falls apart the second you pick it up. The batch that stays in comes out golden, and it holds together, and it’s worth handing to somebody else.
So don’t climb out early. Don’t quit in month nine of a twelve month season. And don’t you dare decide that a season you can’t understand yet is a season that doesn’t count. You will not always get to see the reason while you’re in it. That’s what makes it a season instead of a sentence.
It has been one of the great joys of my life to watch each of my kids work out this stage of their lives. This last year in the oven wore all of us out at times, and it was worth every minute, because it prepared my daughter for the exact moment she’s standing in.
Next week she walks onto that campus. Fresh baked, locked in, and chasing a dream she couldn’t even name twelve months ago.
And her mom and I will be right here, cheering our heads off every step of the way.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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