Not to mention, breadmaking is a hobby with a pretty low price of entry. Flour, water, and just a little bit of salt and yeast. Humble ingredients. I get to take these simple things, roll up my sleeves, get a little messy, and in the end, I have something to show for it. But even more than having something to show, it’s given me something to share. I’ve given loaves way to friends. I’ve enjoyed them over meals with my family.

And along the way, I think bread making has shared some things with me too.

For instance, there’s this part of the process—after all the ingredients have been added and you’ve mixed them together—that the whole mixture just needs to sit for awhile. And slowly, it spreads, filling out all the crevices of whatever container it’s in. But the moment that happens, you have to reach in and change things up. You fold it all in on itself until it starts to show some shape and structure again. And then you leave it some more. You wait. You wait for it to relax and fill up the space again, and the moment it does, you fold it all again. You do this whole process a few different times. And that step helps give it structure. It binds the proteins. It gives the final bread the strength to contain all the processes that are still to come.

Next, the dough just sits. Nothing else. You don’t touch it. You don’t breathe on it. If you watch it, it’ll look like nothing’s happening. But if you come back to it a few hours later, it will have grown double, triple in size. You see, that’s when the real magic of bread making is taking place… in the waiting. The dough is fermenting. It’s taking those simple ingredients you put i, and making some new ones. It’s creating the gasses that will fill up all the structures that were made in the previous step. It’s what will give the bread its rise and, most importantly, it’s the step that makes it delicious.

Then, finally, after a couple more steps, you put the finished dough in an oven with the heat turned all the way up. And you bake it until it’s perfect.

And you end up with bread. And it feels like both the most natural thing in the world, and a little bit like magic because what started as very humble ingredients has become far more than the sum of its parts.

You started with a handful of ordinary ingredients and end up with something worth sharing.

It’s felt for awhile now like God has just kept reaching into my life and stirring things up. Changing things. And then, just when it feels like I’ve settle into all those changes, it’s like he turns stirs it up again. The last couple years have been a near-constant process of disorientation followed by relaxation followed again by disorientation.

At other times, it’s felt like I’ve been left to wait. There’s not a touch, or a whisper. It seems like God has just wandered off and I’ve been abandoned. And it feels so pointless and frustrating, and I wonder if anything is even happening.

And other times, I’ve felt that intense heat. The pressure, the panic, and it feels like more than I can possibly handle.

Learning to make bread has meant me relearning how I’m being made, the ways in which God uses process and circumstance and intention to make me into something more.

Because in the end, he intends to make us more than simply our starting ingredients. He plans to strengthen us, change us, and perfect us… making our lives and our stories into something that just has to be shared.