Several weeks earlier, Alice Grayson had volunteered to bake a cake for the bake sale of the Ladies' Group of the Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Somehow, she forgot all about it until the last minute. She remembered it the morning of the bake sale. After rummaging through her pantry, she found an angel food cake mix and quickly made it while drying her hair, getting dressed for work, and helping her son pack up for boys' scout camp.When she took the cake from the oven, the center had dropped flat, and the cake was horribly disfigured. She exclaimed, "Oh dear, there is not time to bake another cake!"
The cake was very important to Alice because she so much wanted to fit in at her new church, and with her new community of friends. She looked around the house for something to build up the center of the cake. At last, she found it! In the bathroom --- a roll of toilet paper. She plunked it in, and then covered it with icing.
Not only did the finished product look beautiful, but it also looked "perfect"! She felt a surge of pride on her quickness of mind, imaginativeness, inventiveness, resourcefulness.
Before she left the house to drop the cake at the church and head for work, Alice awakened her daughter and gave her some money along with very specific instructions to be at the bake sale the moment it opened at 9:30, buy the cake, and bring it back home.
When the daughter arrived at the sale, she found that the attractive, "perfect" cake had already been sold. Amanda immediately grabbed her cell phone and called her mom.
Alice was horrified! What if everyone were to learn of it, what would they think? She would be ostracized, talked about, ridiculed! All night, Alice laid awake in bed thinking about how people would be pointing fingers at her and talking about her behind her back.
The next day, Alice promised herself she would try not to think about the cake. She would attend the fancy bridal shower luncheon at the home of a fellow church member and try to have a good time.
But she did not really want to attend because the hostess was a snob who had looked down her nose more than once at the fact that Alice was a single parent and not from the founding families of Tuscaloosa. But having already RSVP'd, Alice couldn't think of a truly air-tight and genuinely believable alibi as to why she could not come.
The meal was elegant. The company was definitely upper crust Old South. But to Alice's horror, for the dessert came her cake gloriously on a very elegant, pedestaled silver cake platter! Alice felt as though every drop of blood had drained from her body when she saw the cake.
She tried to get out of her chair in order to tell the hostess all about the cake, but before she could get to her feet, the Mayor's wife said, "What a beautiful cake!"
Alice, still stunned, sank back into her chair when she heard the hostess, a very prominent church member, say: "Thank you, I baked it myself!"
Alice smiled, relaxed, and thought to herself: "God is good!"
Author Unknown