What’s All This Stress and Pain Gonna Get Ya

Every so often I get enough of a leisurely day to pull out the Fleischmann’s. I’m undisciplined in the kitchen (although I’m hoping to grow out of that), but I do love to make a good yeast bread. Cinnamon rolls, homemade tortillas, or cinnamon rolls.

Bread is like a garden except 69 hours less work. You plant some yeast (which my husband researched online just for fun the other night, and we still have an unclear picture of where this originates –a yeast tree? a teenage boy’s bedroom?) Add some flour and other stuff. Then knead.

Press with base of palms. Rotate. Press. Rotate. Press. Rotate. For 10 minutes. Then bake until the smell of heaven requires you to find some real butter and a serrated knife.

Not a gluten free house.

There’s the pressing before the rising, and this is the lesson the Lord has put in front of me in the last few weeks.

Peter tells the believers:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. (1 Peter 5:6 NIV)

There is a pressing of God’s mighty hand on our lives sometimes, and on my calendar it’s marked as a new job, a dead dog, an emptying nest, a funeral, and the buying of eight new tires in nine months’ time. (But then your calendar is marked, too, with the stressful situations that have come and are coming still.)

Knead. Knead. Knead.

I have cratered in my husband’s arms more than once. And in a friend’s arms. And in my cousins arms. And in my brother’s arms. (Stand in line if you want a turn.) But in the pain I am preaching to myself not to wiggle out from underneath all of it.

The kneading of the mighty hand of God –a fearsome experience and always just beyond the elasticity I think I have in me.

But then there’s the rising. Don’t you want to go back and read that verse in 1 Peter one more time? That he may lift you up in due time. Like last night when the California Baptist University choir and orchestra sang the very words and voice of God to me. Sang life and hope. Sang about how there’s sorrow at the foot of the cross but also love. And my spirit doubled in size in the warmth of it.

Kneading and rising.

Sorrow and hope.

All mixed together in this life of mine that will, after this season of pressure, give off an aroma that’s bring-the-butter good. Right? I’m not too bold in saying that?

So here’s an assignment: Walk yourself into a bakery some morning this week.

Inhale through your nose.

Say 1 Peter 5:6 out loud. That’s you sister –humbling yourself under the pressing of the Father’s hand…gonna rise in due time. Just hang tight.