Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns
If you think Jesus would have come into your home that day and not issued a strong rebuke to the head of household, you are mistaken. These words of condemnation have been haunting me for days now. They aren’t all that different than the soundtrack I play in my head on an almost-daily basis. It’s…
I am nesting. On Saturday I emptied the refrigerator. Last summer’s homemade pickles in their jars. The bread ends that seem to multiply on every shelf. The eggs. The milk. The fruit and veggies. All of it sat on the floor or the counter as I carefully removed the shelves and wiped them down with…
I’ve heard that life is like a highway. And it definitely seems like that sometimes. The pace of life swirls around me at dizzying speeds. We’re all so busy. In such a hurry. Always somewhere to be, something else to do. I’m a get-to-the-point, get-there-quick kind of girl. I don’t like to waste time on…
Maybe it’s all the “Celebrity Apprentice” I’ve been watching lately, but I’ve been humming Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” since watching a Royal Wedding special earlier this week. Meatloaf and the royal wedding — kind of a stretch, right? (By the way, did anyone ever figure out what “that” was? You know, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”)
I was captivated by the Royal Wedding this morning. My husband set the alarm for me on his way out to the Y, and I had one hour of uninterrupted fairy tale romance time before the children woke up. (Side note: This bone china mug arrived in the mail this afternoon, straight from England, for my birthday. I’m a little giddy about it.) 
Weddings, in general, have taken on new meaning for me since I’ve been married. My husband and I celebrate four years of marriage in less than a month, and it’s been a roller coaster ride so far but worth every crested hill and sharp turn.
During this television special earlier in the week, one of the reporters commented that he thought Kate would prefer that she wasn’t marrying a prince, that she would like to lead a nice, quiet life in the country and raise a family outside of the public arena. That struck me as truly amazing and sacrificial. Despite her personal preference, for the sake of love, she is entering a life she would not have chosen for herself, a life that will have its difficulties in lack of privacy, rules of etiquette, public appearances and possibly even threats to personal safety. All for love. She could have decided it wasn’t worth it, but for love of a man, who happens to be prince, she is choosing to sacrifice her idea of an ideal life and enter a world that certainly is different from what she has known.
In a sense, it’s what we all do when we get married. We join our lives to someone else’s, aligning our dreams, ambitions and goals to theirs, come what may. I didn’t understand this fully when I got married, and I’m not sure I ever will understand it fully, but joining my life to a man preparing to be a pastor has required sacrifice of things I thought I wanted and expectations I had for how life would be. But I wouldn’t change the choice I made to marry him. For me, there was no one else. He could have been a beggar asking me to live in a cardboard box with him or an astronaut with dreams of living on the moon. That’s the thing about love, the craziest of notions don’t seem all that crazy and as long as I’ve got my husband walking next to me hand-in-hand, I believe we can face anything together.
I imagine Kate could be afraid of the future. She will be queen someday. How do you live every day with that knowledge? Most little girls dream of being a princess; she literally is one. All because she loved a man.
Those of us who choose to join our lives with Christ experience this kind of love, too. For love of the one who first loved us, we’ll do things we never thought we could, give up the lives we’ve always wanted for the lives we never thought we could have. Living the Christ-life is scary, risky, unpredictable and difficult sometimes, but it’s also fulfilling, joyful, purposeful, abundant and freeing. Having experienced life with Christ, I hope that we would say we can’t imagine life any other way.
One of the fun things about living away from family (OK, don’t take that the wrong way!) is the chance to experiment a little with our holiday traditions. This year for Easter, my husband didn’t have to work for the first time since we’ve lived here, so we planned a Bartelt feast for the ages. (We like food. Planning for it. Cooking it. Eating it.)
For over a year, I’ve been wanting to try this homemade rye bread recipe I requested from a woman at church who made some for us after our son was born. (He’s 17 months now. Yes, I’m a procrastinator.) Easter seemed the perfect time to try.
Fact: I have never made homemade yeast bread before.
Fact: I try to follow recipes to a “T.” I am not a great kitchen improviser.
Fact: I get frustrated if I don’t succeed the first time at trying something. (Perfectionism, you are a vice.)
Fact: My husband is a better cook than I am, despite the cinnamon chili story he told in church a few weeks ago.
So, the Saturday before Easter, I gathered up the ingredients, and my nerve, and dove headfirst into homemade bread.
Step 1: Dissolve yeast. Whisk in flour. Cover, let stand for 4 hours.
No problem, although I’m slightly insecure about my kitchen’s ability to foster risen bread. My pizza dough never quite does what I want it to do.
Fact: While making the rye bread, I discovered that I’d been using the wrong amount of yeast when making pizza dough. 1 Tb. of yeast=1 packet, not 2 Tb.
Step 2: Stir in sugar, caraway seeds, salt, AP flour and water. Mix well.
Here’s where it started to get a bit tricky. And intuitive.
Step 3: Add enough flour to form a firm dough.
Huh? I mean, I know what dough is supposed to look like, but as I added more flour, I grew less confident in this endeavor. I kept asking my husband’s opinion.
Step 4: Floured surface; knead till smooth and elastic.
This is what kneading looked like. The dough was sticking to my hands, the wax paper (note to self: don’t knead on wax paper) and I kept adding more flour to try to get the dough to a kneadable state.
Crisis point: I was ready to give up, and things were getting tense in the kitchen. Phil kept telling me what I should be doing and I was ready to punch him. Or cry. Or tell myself I’m a big fat failure at bread making. (Note to self: This was your FIRST TIME making bread.)
Somewhere in the midst of the crisis, he suggested that I flour my hands. Genius. That made a huge difference. Why wasn’t that instruction in the recipe?
My conclusion: Some things are better learned by watching and doing alongside a more experienced person.
We live in Amish country. I have no doubt that a 30-something Amish woman could make bread with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back. She’s seen it done. She’s participated in its creation. And the first time she made it on her own, she’d have had someone watching her.
Even among the non-Amish are women (and some men, like my husband) who grew up watching their mothers and grandmothers make bread from scratch. I was not one of those.
A recipe can’t tell me when the dough is firm or that I should flour my hands or how long I have to knead before the dough becomes “elastic.” It also can’t tell me how to fix my mistakes or encourage me to keep going when I think I’ve screwed up.
In the midst of kneading and trying to salvage the bread, I thought about Christian discipleship and how sometimes we give each other a “recipe” of sorts for how we’re supposed to grow and develop as Christians. Read your Bible, pray, don’t do this, love your neighbor, tell people about Jesus … I’m sure you could add your own. And sometimes we don’t know how to do those things or we fail at some part of the Christian life and want to give up. What we need more than a recipe for Christian growth is a relationship — someone to show us how it’s done, who is more experienced than us, who can give us tips learned from those experiences, and who can encourage us to keep going and assure us that failure is an option but isn’t the end.
I pressed on with the bread, though I’m sure I kneaded it too long.
Step 5: After it (and I) rested for a few minutes, I divided the dough into four loaves, prepared the baking sheets and let the dough rise again. They definitely grew but didn’t really rise like I had hoped.
Step 6: Bake.
Here’s the finished result:
They look like bread and they taste pretty good, but I know I made some mistakes along the way. Baking homemade bread took most of the day, and while I’m not ecstatic about the result, I do feel good about trying. And I intend to try again, just not too soon.
I am grateful, though, for the reminder that it’s OK to fail at something, especially if it’s your first time and you have no one to guide you through. And for the encouragement to not give other Christians a list of “musts” or “shoulds” without committing to walk through life with them.
And I welcome any bread-baking tips you have!