I bought a second bread machine at the thrift store for $8. The pair of monstrous appliances eat up my counter space, and the loaves they produce are a little ugly, not like those that are hand-shaped and baked in a real oven. But I bought a second machine because there is something irresistible to me about taking 5 minutes to dump a few humble ingredients in a pan, hit a 10 hour timer, and wake up to the smell of freshly-baked bread. Breakfast is done even before my eyes open, and there are no messes to clean. Yes, I’ll take it. Thank you.
I have a complicated relationship with bread. I love it. Baking it has been a part of my life for the better part of twenty years. Two years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that implored me to give up the beautiful wheat that arrived in 25-gallon buckets, ready for me to grind and turn into flour, which I had baked with love into breads, cookies, muffins, and cakes for myself and my family. This was part of the way I nourished the people I love. The way I myself was nourished.
I searched for another way. I spent a full year making loaves of bread that tasted like actual bricks. I could have literally built a house out of them, there were so many failed attempts at the glorious loaves of breakfasts-past. And yet, I would eat them, because I needed to survive, and they were the carriers of butter and honey, and there was that faint, reminiscent quality of something I once loved in them.
I have learned a way to make bread that satisfies me now. I grind rice and sorghum, throw in some oats, add some tapioca starch and xanthan gum, all in place of that one forbidden grain, and the dough rises beautifully and makes a dense, nutritious loaf of bread, resplendent with warm butter and a cup of tea. I can put it in the bread machine at night, and in the morning, my breakfast awaits. It is beautiful. I am more grateful for it than the woman who is now sitting in a world-renowned bakery, just having her first bite of the bread that made it famous.
I make a second loaf in the new machine. One that my pickier children will enjoy. The loaves rise higher, the texture of the crumb looks sublime, and the slice is light and airy with a delicate crunch of crust around the square edge.
Everyone is happy and nourished. And we go on with our day.
It is morning now. I left breakfast in a hurry with my son, for an appointment and another diagnosis. I am sitting alone, in a quiet waiting room, doing just that. Waiting. We aren’t here for a life-threatening illness, thank God. We are here, with prayers that God will shed some light on this child’s beautiful mind that experiences the world in a different way. He is in the other room, answering questions, putting together puzzles, calling out memorized sequences of numbers and reordering them backwards, explaining, as if to aliens, the meanings of words like soap and bread, fear and hope, revealing, in little glimpses, the inner workings of his world.
And here I am, as motherhood often finds me, in a quiet room, scrawling tear-stained ink across the blank pages of my journals. God, how do we do this? How will we ever understand enough to raise these children—all uniquely alive with thoughts and feelings and desires and created for specific purposes in this world? How will we nourish them—body, mind, soul, and spirit? How will we teach them the things they need to know? Are we doing it right? Are we doing enough? There is no instruction manual for this. No list to check off. No recipe to follow. There is no easy answer to raising children, diagnoses or not. Each mind and heart is made by God, one of its kind, set apart to reveal a secret glory. I am unqualified for the task before me.
And yet, as I sit here, waiting and praying, in my mind, I circle back to bread. It is so simple. It is a handful of ingredients. It isn’t costly, but it fills us full. When the recipe needs tweaking, there are other ingredients that will nourish and satisfy and make us grateful for what is set before us.
I stop and scribble down the words that Jesus taught me to pray: Give us this day our daily bread. And I pray it with all my heart.
Over and over I see it. When I open my eyes and am rushed with overwhelm at the life that has become daily for me, full of needs that will never be satisfied and little ones with insatiable hunger to know, experience, and live life to the full with me as their main advocate and interpreter of the world, the one who answers every question, the one who puts every meal on this blessed table, the one who prays and plans over each tenuous future, I want a detailed plan and a well-stocked cupboard of answers to the questions that eat away at me.
But God deals in daily bread. The manna from heaven. Giving what is required in this moment, asking for a faith that is as simple as flour, yeast, and water thrown into a bread machine.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? (Matthew 6:25-27)
I come back to simple, wholesome bread. I receive what God provides with a grateful heart. I experience his mercy as the golden-brown glow of a fresh loaf, the smell that permeates the whole sleeping house, the slight crunch of the first slice, and the warmth in my hand as I lift it to my mouth. And I taste and see that the Lord is good, and that He provides all that I need.
From the Family Archive:
Remember one thing that I say
It’s going to be okay
One day this world will pass away
The soul and spirit fly away
From the Podcast:
There are seasons of my life where I become acutely aware that I am in way over my head. When I want to hand my life over to someone who is more qualified to run it for me because I literally do not know what I’ve gotten myself into. I find that as overwhelming as these seasons may be, these are also the times when I see the hand of God reaching out to help me. He knows I cannot do it on my own. And he doesn’t expect me to. He is with me. Always. In this episode, I would like to share with you some of the unexpected ways that God has calmed my anxious heart. And I hope if you have been feeling the same, it will be an encouragement to you.
(Recorded November 29, 2022)
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Thanks so much for sharing this, Tony!