Rise

It’s been a loooooonnng time a’coming, but I’m jumping back into the 5-Minute Friday writing prompt and habit.

When my grandmother designed her dream kitchen, she included a special-sized counter top with an embedded block of marble.  Because she was that kind of baker.  The kind who could coax a more winsome pie crust out of a hunk dough kneaded on that cool slab of marble.

I think of my grandmother as I brush flour from the surface of her recipe card, peering past the splatters and stains and floury fingerprints of countless batches of bread.  I think of the way life presses around me, urging one more quick glance at email, one quicker step toward the door, one sped-through yellow light in the hope of catching the next one green.  Everything I do seems hemmed by efficiency and rush.

Not bread.

The best way to kill bread is to rush.  When I bake bread, I plunge my hands into the sticky flesh of something living.  Something that will live or die by the patience and care I take to let it go.  To let it be.  To let it rise.  I bake from my grandmother’s recipe and think of the countless times her hands plunged and then waited for the same miracle to occur.

Bread is my antidote to efficiency and rush.

It’s not always easy to summon the patience and structure my day around the slow, methodical schedule of bread.  But as I watch that kneaded lump rise, and rise, and rise as I do nothing, nothing, nothing and then bake into a loaf of golden, yeasty perfection, I’m humbled by the metaphor it offers.

My efficiency and rush in so many areas does not create.  It does not come with some guarantee of making me a better person.

But the times in life when I sit and wait for God’s plan to unfold, combust, and rise in me, I am at peace.  After the time and the patience, I eat the loaf of His labors in my life.  And it tastes of perfection.