Baking Bread

Early this morning as I woke up and picked up my conversation with the Father where I'd left off, I had an image of Him making bread. As I was reflecting on it, He impressed me with a truth He wanted me to understand. The truth being that the reason we are made is NOT to muddle through this world and try for dear life just to hang on so we can die and maybe get to heaven one day. No. The reason we are made is so that God may have relationship with us... I got this picture of bread rising. I'm not much of a baker , as you may have discovered if you’ve come to my house and been offered dessert. But I do remember my mom making bread sometimes. After she measured the right amount of yeast with the right temperature of water, she added it to the dough, covered it with a cloth and let it rise for an hour or so. For me, it was already too long to wait! Finally, the dough rose. Yay! But then instead of putting it in the pan and into the oven, she'd take this perfectly smooth, puffy, beautiful mound of dough and punch it down so hard with her fist with one big "pow!" that it would shrink back to almost nothing again, cover it again with that cloth, and just wait. I always detested that part. I mean, we waited for an hour and a half of rising, and for what? All she did was punch it right back down. Every time, I tried to get her to skip that part. I don't know why bread has to rise that way, but I suppose that if it didn't get to go through all those stages of development, that when it was finally baked and pulled out of the oven and a corner torn off and popped into my mouth - it wouldn't have been so succulent and delicious. It would probably have been chewy, and tough, and hard as a rock.


But if the Lord is our Baker, I do not want him to pull a tough, chewy, hard as a rock Deborah out of the oven when the timer goes off! So, I guess all that rising, and waiting, and even the punching-down part is necessary. And since I know He doesn't put the timer on and leave the kitchen while I'm rising, but He loves me, and encourages me, and keeps me in just the right temperature and environment necessary for me to rise well - I guess I can wait it out.


I believe this is also what it’s like to have patience. Patience is evidence of the Holy Spirit in us, but in practice, it is derived from faith. When we stay in faith, and do not give up over a stretch of time and circumstances – we have demonstrated patience. No matter the pounding, the kneeding, or the heat – when we keep believing Him and His Word, eventually the broken pieces of ourselves that we give to Him come out of the oven. And with this beautiful, hand-crafted creation, He can feed others.