Lisa Aldrich is a busy Michigan mother, so when she was planning a birthday party, she quickly became busy with all the little details. The day of the party, Lisa realized that she had forgotten to buy or order any sort of cake. In fact, Lisa did not even remember about the cake until she saw an advertisement that mentioned birthday cakes! Lisa decided to run to the store and hope they had some sort of suitable cake there.
After picking out a cake at Meijer, Lisa asked one of the employees if she could write, “Happy Birthday Mandy” on the cake. The employee looked like one of the people working at the bakery, so Lisa assumed that she could decorate the cake quickly. Lisa was surprised when it took the employee a while, but she was just relieved and grateful to get a cake in time. Even though she was busy, Lisa took the time to look the employee in the eye and thank her for decorating the cake.
As the employee walked away, Lisa looked down and actually saw the cake. Though everything was spelled correctly, the purple writing was all skewed towards one side, and the pink frosting decorating the edges was quite messy. It was not quite what she wanted, but Lisa decided not to make a fuss. She explained, “It didn’t really matter to me that it looked so bad. I thought people would think it was funny.”
However, when she got to the checkout, the cashier noticed that the cake was not up the grocery store’s usual standards. A manager was called over, and the employees offered to get Lisa a remade cake free of charge. However, Lisa laughed it off, told them she was happy with the cake, and insisted on paying for it. Once the cashiers figured out who had decorated the cake, they explained to Lisa what had happened.
The employee who wrote on the cake had autism. Though she was not a cake decorators, people with autism tend to be very literal, so she assumed that she needed to do precisely what the customer asked instead of finding one of the store’s cake decorators. Unfortunately, autism also causes many issues with fine motor control, so she did not quite have the coordination to write neatly on the cake. The other cashiers at the store were thrilled to learn how kind Lisa had been despite the cake. One of them told Lisa, “Thank you for smiling and thanking her…you probably made her day.”
Lisa decided to share her heartwarming experience by posting a picture of the cake on the grocery store’s Facebook page. The post quickly went viral, and in just a couple days, it was shared over 90,000 times. Lisa was surprised and very touched by the supportive response that she got after sharing the cake. She says, “I am totally overwhelmed by God’s goodness, and how he has used this cake story! I am sitting here weeping and reading through 100+ messages from people all over the country who have a loved one with Autism, thanking me. I just feel the need to say again — I didn’t do anything special. Be nice. That is all. I can’t believe how awesome God is that he is using this story to bless so many people! God is so, so good.”