Some reflections

I’ve been making bread since I was about eleven years old. My age has since doubled but still every time I knead the dough and set it aside to rise there’s a question in my mind as to what will really happen. When I come back an hour later and uncover the dough to find it doubled in size it’s always with some of the same eleven-year-old wonder I had the first time I tried my hand at baking.
I’m waiting for dough to rise. In about forty-five minutes I’ll go back to the kitchen and say a little prayer before I take the towel off the bowl and look inside. I thought a lot about faith today. Maybe faith isn’t so much the assurance that the dough will rise. Maybe it’s the mixing and the kneading that happen before. I’ve learned quite a few things in these tumultuous last couple of years of mine and one of the “biggies” is the knowledge that a loving Heavenly Father isn’t going to deprive us of the chance to walk out into the dark sometimes. He’s going to take off our training wheels, knowing full well that we might fall. And faith means dealing with it. I guess that lesson I’ve learned is this: faith means not knowing all the answers, and dealing with it.
Some of the Elders on the mission were so sure they’d become CEO’s and senators because “the Lord never forgets His returned missionaries.” Well, that’s certainly true but a mission doesn’t come with that sort of severance package. Life is going to suck sometimes, and the expectation that we’ll be coddled and protected from the crap the world is ready to throw at us is setting us up for a world of trouble.
Not that I’m unhappy, or that I feel like I haven’t been enormously blessed. However, I do not expect that life will always be a piece of cake. I’ll take it as it comes, but I’m sure things won’t always be as easy as they are now. And that’s life, right?
So we can have peace, we can have comfort, and we can have an assurance that all will work out. But it takes a while for the dough to rise.
PS: I was tempted to call this blog “Every hour I knead thee” just so I could imagine the groans and eye rolls (and screams and gouging out of eyes, depending on how well you know me…). But now I get to imagine it all anyway.