Many years ago I had a half a loaf of french bread and I thought I would make some bread pudding with it. I had heard of bread pudding but I had never eaten it before or had even seen it so I thought this would be a new, fun adventure. I found a recipe and went to work. When I got to the part of the recipe where it referred to the bread, it was only one cup of cut up bread pieces. I thought that wasn’t very much so it had to be packed bread. I crammed as much bread as I could into the measuring cup and proceeded to make the bread. It came out more like bread brick pudding but I never had it before so I didn’t know the difference. I thought it was a little “thick” and couldn’t figure out why it was called a pudding when it was more like a loaf of bread. My family ate it and I continued to make bread pudding occasionally. Then one time I had it for dessert in a restaurant. It was creamy, pudding-like and delicious. Nothing even close to a brick. It was at this point that I obviously discovered that for years I had been making bread pudding wrong, very wrong. So I tried it without packing the bread into the measuring cup. It was light and pudding-like and delicious.
I have discovered that life’s like that. Sometimes it takes someone showing me a better way, the correct way to get the results I want. Sometimes I don’t even know I’m doing something the wrong way, that there is a better way. Of course I have to laugh at myself when I find out I could have been doing something different or easier or better all along. This also reminds me of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the many times I’ve done something my way, out of ignorance or even willful disobedience, when His way is so much better. When I “kick against the pricks” of conscience because I want to do something my way. This reminds me that when I’m finally ready to listen to Him and discover my way is so lacking and His way is so much better. And I finally discover that doing something my way just produces a bread pudding brick. And of course once I have tasted of His better way, just like the creamy bread pudding, I want to do it His way. The parable of the bread pudding teaches me to not settle for bricks.
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2015/10/yielding-our-hearts-to-god?lang=eng