The Bread That Rose While I Slept

She set it at nine, and she knew before she covered it that she had done it wrong.

The water was too hot. She has done this for fifty years, and she still put her wrist under the tap and thought, that will do, and it would not do, and she knew it going in and she did it anyway because it was nine o'clock and she wanted to be in bed.

So she covered the bowl with the cloth and put it on the shelf over the stove and went up. And lay there. And did the thing she does, which is to run the whole business again: too hot, and the yeast is from the jar at the back, and the kitchen is cold since they did the window, and she should have started at seven like a person with any sense.

She got up at ten past four for the usual reason and did not go down, because she did not want to look at it.

Six o'clock, then. She came down in her robe with her hair not done, went to fill the kettle, and stopped, because the cloth was not lying flat on the bowl any more. It was up. Properly up, a dome of it, and when she lifted it off the dough had come over the rim on one side and slid down the outside of the bowl about two inches and stopped there, the way it does.

She stood there.

Sixty six years old, standing in her own kitchen at six in the morning, arguing out loud with a bowl. She actually said something. She said, well, you had no business doing that.

Because here is the thing she cannot get around, and she has been standing here five minutes now with the kettle not filled. She did it wrong. She still thinks she did it wrong. And it rose anyway, in the dark, while she was upstairs going over the reasons it would not, and she had absolutely nothing to do with the part that mattered.

The light is coming in over the sink the way it does in that kitchen at six, and there is flour on the boards from last time, and a bowl on the table that did not consult her.

You have stood at that bowl. Maybe not bread. Maybe a prayer you were sure you botched, a Sunday you sat through feeling like a fraud, a stretch of months where you were doing all of it wrong and knew you were. And the question is not whether you did it wrong. You may well have. The question is what you thought was doing the rising.

He knows not how

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that hands an old woman a better method and calls it teaching. It is not teaching. Telling her to use a thermometer gets the bread right and leaves the actual trouble exactly where it was, which is a woman who believes that when she does it wrong nothing happens. So there is no method coming out of this.

Jesus tells a short parable that most people go straight past. So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how (Mark 4:26-27).

Read the man's part. He scatters, and then he sleeps and gets up, sleeps and gets up, which is a description of an ordinary life and not of a spiritual practice. And read the last four words, because they are the whole parable: he knoweth not how.

He does not know. He is not being told. There is no technique in the passage, no correct procedure, no place where the man's competence enters the account, and Jesus offers this as a picture of the kingdom rather than as a warning about it.

You have things growing in you by a process you were never given access to. That is not a comforting gloss on the text; Mark 4:27 says he knows not how, and the Holy Spirit who put that clause in the Gospel put it there so nobody could turn the kingdom into a procedure.

And then the next verse: For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear (Mark 4:28). Of herself. The ground does it. Not the man, and not the man's confidence in the man.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself.Mark 4:27-28

Abiding has nothing to get right

Now John 15, which is the floor under this whole thing.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me (John 15:4). A branch is not skilled. It cannot do it badly and it cannot do it well. It is attached, and sap comes up, and something appears on it that it did not make and did not oversee.

Which is why the water being too hot is not the point and never was, and why a woman lying awake going over the reasons was going over the wrong list entirely.

You have been attached through every night you spent certain you had ruined it. John 15:4 makes abiding a place rather than a performance, and the Spirit is the sap; a branch does not come loose because the person it is growing on thinks poorly of herself at half past ten at night.

And that is the guardrail, said plain: a woman who is sure she does it wrong is not a woman who is far from God. She is a woman who has been made responsible for the rising, and nobody ever made her responsible for that except her.

This is yours already, whatever the temperature of the water: a work in you that does not depend on your competence. Philippians 1:6 says He who has begun a good work in you will perform it, and both verbs in that promise belong to Him; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) was in a cold kitchen at two in the morning.

What the lying awake is about

Let me name the thing under the going over it, because it is not perfectionism and it is not vanity about bread.

It sounds like this: if I do it wrong, nothing happens, and I have believed that about myself since I was a girl. That is the sentence, and it has been running under fifty years of good bread, and it has never been said to a living soul.

You were never the reason anything rose, and the not being the reason is the good news. 1 Corinthians 3:7 says neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who gives the growth, and Paul says not anything, which sounds harsh and is the kindest sentence in the letter; the Holy Spirit who inspired it took the whole weight off the planter on purpose.

Fruit is not output, and a kitchen is a good place to see the difference. Output is the loaf: weighed, timed, gone by Thursday. Fruit is what has grown on a woman who gets up and makes bread for people whether or not she feels like a fraud, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that faithfulness, and it does not have a temperature and cannot be got wrong.