Sourdough's got me thinkin'...🤔
about sin, faith and surrender
Welcome to Kara Outdoors! This is where I share about life, faith, the outdoors, wellness and some tidbits of wisdom and knowledge I’ve gained along the way. Subscribe below to join the fun directly to your inbox or Substack app. If this is your first time here, you can catch up on the last few posts by following this link.
My beautiful, thoughtful friend gave me a gift basket for my birthday and it contained a loaf of sourdough bread. She knows me well and I felt very loved!
That little loaf is the perfect level of sour for me (not very sour as I am new to embracing sourdough) and the perfect combo of fluffy and chewy. It was so satisfying to eat that I didn’t feel compelled to eat it all at once. Each time I ate a slice I would go away feeling content and satisfied.
This got me thinking about faith and sin…
The last couple years have been tough and at some point I just threw up my hands and decided to give in to sin. Don’t worry, I haven’t gone totally off the rails but I have allowed pride, sloth and anger to rule my life for a season and it’s not been good.
It’s been dark, tiring and defeating. What I thought would be easier, less tiring and freeing has actually been the opposite. Allowing sin to run rampant has held me down, stifled creativity and left me feeling stuck in limbo.
It’s been a slow process of surrender and repentance to gain ground that I lost through my rebellion.
As I was eating that most delightful sourdough and contemplating the state of my life, I started thinking about how Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to yeast which permeates dough changing the whole thing.
“He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.” Matthew 13:33
Sourdough starter, like yeast, mixes throughout the dough changing it’s structure and flavour. Faith and choosing Godly boundaries is like a well-made sourdough loaf. It is nourishing, satisfying and makes our lives better.
Giving in to sin is like eating white Wonderbread. It seems good in the moment but doesn’t give life (nourishment), doesn’t keep us satisfied (we are hungry again right away) and leads to the degradation of our spirits and quality of life (breakdown of our bodies due to lack of nutrients).
The sourdough and faith are the better options. They seem to take more effort to get them but are worth it in the end. The biggest problem was that once I was in the cycle of sin, I didn’t want to go to the effort of digging it out of my life. It’s painful and takes time and energy. It always seems simpler to stay in the current state of motion or in the comfort of the familiar. But that is a lie and life improves when we do the hard work of rooting out sin.
I have a ways to go and I will not arrive at a place without sin until I die or Jesus returns, but I have renewed my commitment to battling sin and rooting it out of my life.
And I am allowing God’s Word and His Spirit to permeate my being and flavour my life like sourdough starter does through bread dough.