the baker and the dough

Maybe God is a beautiful baker.

He rolls the ingredients of this experience, this life, into our very being. A pinch of laughter with a tablespoon of weeping...Mourning, dancing…Seeking and giving up…Tearing and mending, silence and uproarious noise…love, hate…war, peace…gathering and scattering…embraces and longing glances…crumbling walls and built bridges…killing, healing…planting and inevitable uprooting…

Amidst all of these ingredients, He mixes in a time to be born and a time to die.

And we struggle and thrash about, unaware that it has all been designed just so. We imagine that the whole story revolves around us when it is completely the opposite. We revolve around the story, completely ancillary to its existence.

We fight off the ingredients He mixes into our lives, attempting to choose which and at what portion. And yet, grief comes relentlessly with brokenness and pain. And it is eventually met with redemption and hope, with new life and joy. And it cycles through again, as the hands of the Almighty knead us into submission.

I like to think that eventually we begin to understand that this journey we’re on is not toward perfection, but completion. After all, birthed in the reaction between one chemical and another, and grown and formed by the ingredients that shape our days, we are eventually removed from the oven, finally feeling finished. We are beginning to understand that all of the ingredients made us just who we needed to be after all, that the sorrow was as important as the joy. The warmth that has welled up inside of us begins to cool and our assurance of place is again shaken – as we are consumed back into the center of the source that created us in the first place…

(This was originally posted on June 4th, 2008 - I just like it, so I thought I would post it again.)