Baking Bread

Last Friday I had a drive do to something with my hands... so I prepared the kids and the kitchen for a day of being productive. We made chicken noodle soup, from scratch, INCLUDING the noodles, and another giant batch of Mennonite Double-Buns (Zweiback). I can't tell you how much I *LOVE* to make bread. There is something entirely spiritual about it. Thinking on the warm brown earth that grew the wheat, the work of the farmer, the mill that crushed it into beautifully soft white flour, the alchemy that turns these simple ingredients into something that smells heavenly, only after being crushed, drowned, beaten and baked. As I was kneading, and shaping the small buns I couldn't help but think through how Christ called Himself the Bread of Life, and used bread as a symbol for his own body. (!) A body that was transformed into the beautiful and useful for salvation and the salvation of His people only after being scorned, beatened and dying. Christ became something new, as we will become something new when we are given a new body at the Resurrection. A lasting, more-real-than-reality body.
It's not a fairy tale. Think upon the transformation that bread undergoes!

Then I cleaned like a mad woman before Jason came home and whipped up an apple crisp so I could enjoy the evening with a relatively tidy kitchen (because at that point I was exahusted). It was such a satisfying thing to enjoy the fruit of physical labour by eating hot delicious soup with homemade noodles, and bread.
I have to remind myself that there is pleasure in work,and that this, after all, is what my body was made for. It felt good that night to lie down in my warm bed, feeling as though I really had accomplished something after all.

It was a little thing, but I really hope to do it more often.