Hi all,
I took last week off as is my tradition for my birthday week. That means we’re back on track this week. I hope your summer is off to a good start.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Practice
Recently I’ve been exploring some “small and boring” ways to invest in your community. This series starts back here.
I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. -- Vincent VanGogh
Like many couples who married in the late 90’s, David and I received a breadmaker for a wedding gift. Actually, we received two breadmakers. We returned one and bought more towels with the money. Try as I might, I could never get the breadmaker to cooperate with me. I know these machines are supposed to take a process and make it automatic, but all I could ever get my breadmaker to bake was a very specific kind of yeasty brick.
Eventually, I gave the breadmaker away. If you gave me that breadmaker, I am sorry that I used it poorly. I assume it has found a home with someone who is better at it than I am. I decided I wanted to just learn how to make bread. By hand. In a bowl.
So I started trying to learn. It turned into a several-year process. It turns out that if you are busy having babies, moving across the country a couple of times, and trying to live a productive life, you don’t have a ton of time for perfecting a breadmaking process. But I kept at it. My first victory was a rough loaf of white bread with rosemary, made to copycat that amazing bread that they bring you at Macaroni Grill. Once I figured out white flour breads, I started trying my hand at heavier wheat flours. Eventually, I reached the point where I was fairly confident throwing together a bread dough, kneading it by hand, and baking up a consistently good loaf -- just in time for the gluten-free kick to arrive.
Learning to bake bread involves a few variables. The temperature of the water can make a big difference. Too cold, and the yeast won’t activate. Too hot, and the yeast dies. You might need to adjust the time spent kneading due to the kind of flour you’re using. You will definitely need to be aware of different rising times, depending on the temperature of your kitchen, time of year (humidity matters!), and the kind of bread you’re making.
This all took practice for me to figure out. A number of batches went directly into the trash. Some loaves were saved but didn’t taste great. My husband chewed his way through a lot of experiments until he could confidently bite into a slice of bread without flinching.
What You Don’t Know How to Do
There’s a popular word that’s tossed around right now: “adulting.” It is frequently accompanied by a hashtag. Sometimes people use it to mean that they are having a decidedly unfun weekend. Nothing makes you feel “adult” (read that as old) like spending a Saturday cleaning your apartment, doing laundry, paying bills, and meeting up with your counselor. Gone are the carefree Saturdays of childhood! Hello, responsibility.
Many times, I hear people say this when they’re doing something hard or new to them. Managing a budget? Figuring out what food or resources to bring a person in need? Serving in a church ministry with people you don’t know? That’s ADULTING.
At the end of the day, we are all learning all kinds of things as we go. There are lots of ways you can have a small, faithful impact in your community, but you’re not going to be good at a lot of them right off the bat. We all have natural gifts and talents, and maybe some of those might lend themselves to one or more of these areas. But honestly, we are not good at a lot of things right off the bat. We need practice.
Maybe for you, it’s not making bread, but it’s taking initiative in a conversation with someone you don’t know. Maybe it’s learning how to use a calendar and be intentional with your time and gifts. Maybe it’s having a certain kind of conversation that you feel ill-prepared for.
I am trying to train my daughter in some small and boring ways as she grows up. A few months ago, she and I paid a visit to a family who had just welcomed a newborn. I made it a “training exercise.” There are things I learned from church women before me, that I wanted to pass on to her. “Text them when you’re on your way.” “Maybe the mom could use a milkshake or an iced coffee.” “Wash your hands before you touch the baby.” “Don’t stay too long.” These are all things I learned -- that she needs to learn -- that we need to practice. Even the most experienced church mom had a time in her life when she didn’t know them.
So please be patient with yourself. In your life, you will be called upon to do things you don’t know how to do. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. It just means you don’t know how to do them yet. Maybe you will learn how to do them and become proficient. Maybe you will always struggle with doing them. Both of these things are OK. Keep going. Faithfulness is the goal, not perfection.
Walking on the water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is a different thing. Peter walked on the water to go to Jesus, but he followed Him afar off on the land. We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to exceptional things for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes. - Oswald Chambers
For the Anglophiles
So here’s one great thing about English soccer: relegation and promotion. The fact that you can drop in and out of the level you’re in, means that a tiny team like LUTON TOWN sometimes gets promoted. Next year, the huge Premier League clubs will be visiting their little stadium (pictured above) that holds 10,000. Just fantastic! Congrats to them.
My daughter doesn’t have a consistent team allegiance in soccer. Each season, she picks a newly-promoted team to cheer for. Having cheered her Nottingham Forest to stay up this year, she will root for Luton Town (the “Hatters”) next year. They also have one of the best crests I’ve seen:
Reads & Listens of the Week
Here’s your “if-you-read-one-thing” recommendation of the week: People Aren’t Avatars for the Good and/or Bad Things. “People are actually interesting. They can surprise you, if you’ll let them. But you’ll only get the chance to be surprised if you are humble and patient with them. That can be hard to do under the best of circumstances and can be nearly impossible in digitally mediated relationships.”
Finding Rest in a Restless World: I loved this interview on the Good Faith podcast. Recently Andy Crouch has mentioned the difference between (1) rest and leisure; and (2) work and toil. This is a thought-provoking conversation around that topic.
Salvation South tells us that The Real Ted Lasso Lives in North Carolina. “A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life.”
…we also need to be reminded in this do-it-yourself age that it is indeed God who has made us, and not we ourselves. We are human and humble and of the earth, and we cannot create until we acknowledge our createdness. - Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water