saltandlight

You want to know what I’ve been doing lately? Well I’m going to tell you! LOL Because I love to talk about it. If you don’t know me, when I get started on something new, I kind of tend to obsess about it a little bit. So my family is probably sick of hearing me talk about it so now I am going to tell you all about it. (It’s sourdough by the way!)

The new year started out pretty crazy for us. We had a tragic death in the family. And then we got hit with a rare snow storm. Our neck of the woods rarely gets snow at all. We might get snow once every 10 years. And when we do, it doesn’t always last very long. So what did I decide to do right in the middle of all the craziness? And the freezing cold? Sourdough. I decided to make a sourdough starter!

Now I have learned that this was the absolute worse time to try to make a sourdough starter. However, we did pull through. My sourdough starter, named Earl, took about 3 weeks (probably because of the cold) but he finally started making some bread. It’s really cool because you make the yeast yourself. You put some flour and water in a jar and you grow the yeast yourself for a few weeks by feeding and discarding every day. Once your starter is ready you can start baking with it by using a little bit of your natural (wild) yeast, bread flour, salt and water. There are many different ways to do it. And you can add inclusions and things like that. I haven’t gotten into all that too much yet. But I have made some good tasting bread. 🙂

I was thinking recently about how sourdough relates to the Bible and Jesus. I found something that I loved. I knew there were verses about leaven in the bible. There is a parable that Jesus tells in Matthew 13:33. “He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” And in Galatians 5:9 it says “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” The word leaven is another word for yeast.

What is neat about it is how the wild yeast created in your home environment can work itself into a loaf and make it rise. It only takes a little bit of the leaven or yeast but with a little bit of time and care (and patience) it spreads through out the dough and creates beautiful bread. Another thing about sourdough starter is that it takes maintenance. Once the starter is created it cannot just be left alone. It must be fed daily.

Every day I have to discard some of the starter and feed it to make it grow and maintain it’s health. This reminds me of how we also need to discard and feed our minds and hearts. We have to discard the worldly stuff that we see and hear by praying and asking the Lord to remove those things from us. We have to feed our minds and hearts each day by reading God’s Word.

A weak and acidic starter will make a bad loaf of bread. It might be edible, but it won’t be as good as it could be. A weak Christian will stumble in their faith and possibly cause others to stumble. You could even ruin your testimony if you don’t get yourself back on track.

Yeast works slowly and silently, but the end result is undeniable. The same is true of how God works in our lives. The nature of yeast is to grow and change whatever it comes in contact with. When we accept Christ in our lives, He changes us from the inside out!

I just thought that these comparisons were so neat and now I love sourdough even more!

~ Cheryl