I made bread tonight. I’ve been eating it a lot more lately, consequently I’ve been making my two loaves every week and a half or so. Sometimes more frequently. I’d make more at a time except for the fact that I hate freezing it and I only have  two loaf pans.

There are a lot of blogs that I follow. A lot. Thankfully, I have an RSS set up so that I can just have them appear rather than me having to waste time going and checking them each day. One section of my followed blogs is a group of people from all over the world who are committed to living their faith differently. Not different in the “Oh, she’s diff-er-ent” sort of way, but different in the way that makes me stop and think about how I live my faith. Different because they have obviously stopped to think about what works in their lives and because they are continually challenging their and my theology.

Today, a post popped up by Cheryl in Australia. She contributed to a book I read earlier this year which I really liked, and I’ve been following her blog ever since. It is interesting that I read this post today, bread day, because it is all about bread.

We get really excited about yeast when we bake bread. I, for one, love to watch those hard, round pellets grow and become alive and then, unseen, cause my bread to expand and rise. Yeast is so Biblical too, isn’t it. Matthew 13 has us reading the words of Jesus explain that the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that gets mixed into a large amount of flour until it works itself all the way through the dough.

Cheryl got me thinking about how the yeast isn’t really the important part. We get all excited about the yeast, but we could still eat bread without it. It just wouldn’t be light and fluffy. It is really the flour and water that is important.

I got to thinking further, and I may be way off of the original point here, about how the flour and water are so ordinary. Yes, as Cheryl said, the higher quality flour is going to make higher quality bread. But it is flour. It is the ordinary things that God takes to make the stuff we need.

I don’t know if that even makes sense, but that is where my thoughts wandered tonight as I kneaded bread (and also made yam and black bean burgers, and chipotle yam rolls!).