LovingHim-RaisingThem

I’ve been making sourdough bread for about a month now.

Mostly I love it! I love the steady 3 day process, I love the simplicity of bread made from flour, water and salt. I love the smell that fills our house when it bakes. I love that no two loaves look the same. I love holding in my hands something I’ve created with love and care. I love giving it away to friends or inviting others over to share it. I love wrapping it up in a beautiful cloth, taking it out on our family adventures and eating it, feeling for a moment that we live in a more simple age.

But do you know what I don’t love?……

I don’t love how I’m not great at it already. I mean come on, it’s been 4 weeks why doesn’t it look like the one I buy at the bakery! I’m following the instructions, where are my perfect results! Patience and ‘the long road’ aren’t really my happy place. Recent explorations of personality tests and enneagram tests reveal what I’m already painfully aware of. I give myself a hard time and want everything to be right and just and fair all of the time. I can never achieve the ridiculously high standards I set for myself and therefore nor can anyone else around me. Grace is a lesson I’m going to have the learn the long and steady way, just like baking my bread….an overnight success this will not be.

A familiar call to john 15 and the vine and branches. (Read the whole chapter, it’s amazing)

Soaking not striving

Soaking in God often doesn’t feel dramatic or cause spectacular overnight results. Sometimes I pray first thing in the morning , declare a couple of scriptures and am disappointed that I haven’t turned into mother teresa by lunchtime. How can I have just shouted at my toddler for accidentally dropping milk everywhere, I chastise myself! I prayed this morning where is my self control. The fruit of the spirit is more of a slow and steady, day by day, glory by glory situation. We don’t eat a salad one day and have lost a stone by the next…..transformation takes time. Slow steady obedience brings transformation. It isn’t glamorous but it is real. And real change stands the test of time. As you faithfully abide you will be transformed. You’re gonna need a lot of patience and a lot of grace for yourself, but the fruit will come in due season if we do not give up, fix our eyes and keep going.

One of my loaves got stuck this week and the beautiful bottom crust got ripped off the bread and stuck to the tray. I pushed away initial disappointment and made a choice to be grateful. I ate it this morning and smiled.

It’s real, I made it with my own hands and I tried my best. 

Give yourself grace today in the midst of everything you do, and one day you will wake up put the bread in the oven and out will come a loaf like the one from the bakery.