bread & marriage

I am learning much about bread baking and marriage these days.

As you stretch the dough, as you pull at it and push into it, it actually gets stronger. The pressure activates the gluten in the wheat. These stretches and folds, it ensures that your bread maintains the shape and develops the rise it is designed to.

So goes marriage, relationships. As you push and pull, as you stretch and fold yourselves into one another, strength builds. The temptation is to assume the opposite: that the pulling is bad, the friction is harmful so we close our mouths and silence our hearts to its truth. Instead, when we give into the pulling, to the kneading, folding, resting, we develop strength. We produce the intended results: intimacy, partnership, selfless love of another.

These things take time and we must give ourselves over to each part of the process--the painful, the uncomfortable, the counter-intuitive--to truly create something akin to magic.