CHOCOLATE CAKE

For those who are true lovers of chocolate, there is almost nothing which tastes better. Chocolate candy bars, chocolate ice cream, chocolate pie, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate milk, and of course, chocolate cake. Freshly baked, moist, mouth-watering chocolate cake topped with chocolate icing. But almost no one eats this type of food without some reservation. Its full of calories, fat, cholesterol, and many other things we would rather do without.

Eating a piece of chocolate cake certainly has its advantages. It tastes soooo good. But at the same time it has its disadvantages. Put simply, it can make you fat. So before you sit down to enjoy that piece of cake you mentally ask yourself if you should have it. You are actually weighing the advantages and disadvantages of eating the piece of cake to decide which is more important.

If you really stop and think about it we do this very same thing every day with everything we do. We may not actually think of it in this way, but we are still going through the same basic process. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning you have to decide which is more important, getting a couple of hours more sleep, or keeping your job. On the way to work you have to decide if its worse to be a couple of minutes late or to risk getting a speeding ticket.

In everything we do there are advantages and disadvantages. Our lives are nothing more than a series of these decisions where we decide which path is more appealing. Sometimes we make the right decision, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we even know one direction is best for us, but we still choose the other. That's like eating a big piece of chocolate cake when your are supposed to be on a diet.

Many of these decisions we make are trivial in nature. Others are not. There are some which are of tremendous importance. Decisions which will affect us for the rest of our lives, and beyond. When we make these decisions it is vital that we take the utmost care in weighing the consequences of each path presented to us. And never forget, the eternal consequences of any action always outweigh the earthly consequences.

Living a Christian life requires a great deal of patience and self control. There is a multitude of things in the world which man finds to be pleasurable. The problem is that many of these things are also sinful. We must learn to control our carnal urges realizing that the joys of Heaven will be far greater than anything we could ever hope for on the earth.

All of our lives are unique and take individual paths. But over all there are two paths we can travel. Righteous and unrighteous. We can choose to pursue the pleasures of this life, which amounts to little more than a few crumbs from the cake. Or we can choose to pursue eternal life where the whole cake can be ours, icing included.