Baking Ideas is Like Baking Bread

How we need time for ideas to mature, marinate and resonate!

Photo by Evan Brorby on Unsplash

I’ve worked on this poem for a week now. I’ve let this poem, like bread, sit in the oven until it looked done—until it had the desired qualities that both bread and poem promise. Seven days of kneading these words. I even let a couple of people taste this poem and help me with another word or two of needed ingredient. I sent a few crumbs to friends to taste and see if this was any good. I took their feedback and improved the poem and the bread I’m offering here.

But, there is a great lesson in this poem and it is offered through the metaphor of baking bread. I’m not a baker but, I sure do love bread. Nothing compares to a crunchy bread that is still warm with butter oozing from the crust. It’s like a taste of heaven.

Maybe, just maybe this is precisely why Jesus refered to himself as bread and chose broken bread as the lasting way he wanted to be remembered. For me, it’s a compelling idea especially since the bread Jesus offered stayed in the oven for thirty years—until the time was just right. A lesson we need to consider today in light of the events of the world around us.

But, a baker knows what we must now learn. And the point is simply this: Do not take the bread out of the oven until it’s done. A friend told me on Sunday that her recipe called for her bread to “rest” for twenty minutes before you slice it. Slicing, eating too quickly—doesn’t allow the full flavor and force of the bread to come together and to be delicious! Here in baking and life, we learn to give time, time.

Ideas, visions, values and truth are best when they are given time to mature—time to marinate—time to improve with age. And this is the point of the poem and this is the point of life, isn’t it?

This is a lesson for those who have set backs. People who lose races and leaders whose time has not yet come to lead.

See what you think.

I’m going to send this poem to those of you who are Subscribers. You’ll get the poem right out of the oven. The rest will need to just wait or to decide to get in the kitchen with me in the bread making of poems, ideas and wisdom.

Steve