Last Saturday night, I was listening to “Grassroots” on Mississippi Public Radio. On the program, the host Bill Ellison played a song from an album by the Country Gentlemen entitled “Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen.”
The song is about a mother who found herself under pressure because she was facing deadlines and was running out of time. On one occasion it was the approach of Christmas. On another it was the approach of her daughter’s wedding. Faced with the pressure, she needed some space so that she could concentrate on the task at hand. This is the way she put it: “Too many cooks in the kitchen/ Too many irons in the fire/ Too many things that need fixing/ And it’s getting down to the wire.”
Do you know that feeling? We live busy lives, and the demands are sometimes overwhelming. We wonder how we can ever measure up to them.
During the late spring and summer, parents of children involved in Little League Baseball spend a lot of time at the city park. One such parent complained about the demands on his time. He said, “There are some religious cults that place fewer demands on a person’s time than Little League Baseball.”
We have no shortage of people and things that are only too happy to tell us what to do with our time. They love us and have a wonderful plan for our lives.
The problem is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many persons want to be in charge of the exact ingredients of our lives. We have to make a choice about the one who will be in charge.
This is a question about Lordship. In a world of competing voices, we need to listen and respond to the voice of the Lord. His voice is the one that will lead us to make the kinds of lasting investments of our time that will count the most. Turn a deaf ear to other voices that will lead you in different directions. Your life is not to become like a kitchen that is crowded with many cooks all of whom are trying to shout out their instructions the loudest. The problem with many of us is that there are “Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen.”
The other problem is that we have “too many irons in the fire.” When a blacksmith was trying to shape and mold iron, he would place pieces of iron in the fire to heat them and make them malleable. If he were working on several tasks at the same time, he might have several pieces of iron in fire. The problem was that if he had too many irons in the fire, he could not keep up with all of them. He could never accomplish any particular thing of value.
That happens to us. If the devil can’t make you bad, he will make you busy. Either way you will miss out on the life God intended for you to live.
So, be careful with your life. One of the problems that we face is that there are “too many cooks in the kitchen and too many irons in the fire.”
