Bread Rising in a Warm Oven

It is a bread-making day.  Timing has become routine, grinding the wheat while we clean up from breakfast, letting the machine rest, and then making the dough after family prayer.  The wheat grinding is noisy and can be a little messy, but the bread comes out sweet and deep flavored.  I used buttermilk saved from the butter we made last Friday.

I love fresh ground flour, full of the wheat germ and bran that is missing from “whole wheat flour.”  But we grind it with a machine.  The motor died a few weeks ago, still under warranty, and we were without a grinder while they shipped a replacement.  I felt our dependence.  We have to have electricity and this machine to make flour.  I looked over the hand-crank models again, thinking maybe now is the time to get one.

My life has become like the dough sitting in the warm oven, slowly rising.  As I’ve stepped out of full time ministry for almost 18 months now, telling the world I’m taking a little break, I’ve wondered many times if actually ministry was just a phase in my life, not this break.  Am I turning to something different, or is God resting me in the warm oven, letting the yeast slowly rise until I become sweet and deep flavored?

From the kitchen window, the garden looks healthy but not urgent.  Then I remember what’s out there, ripening under leaves, waiting to be harvested — watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, peppers.  It is urgent.  Tonight we’ll pick a watermelon for dinner.  We’ll put cucumbers in the frig until we’re ready to make pickles.  We’ll pick tomatoes and freeze them until I’m ready to make sauce.  God’s abundance can be demanding.