High Fidelity

There was a time when I went on a carb-free diet. I ate a lot of cheese and meat and a smattering of vegetables. But absolutely no bread or sugar came anywhere near my mouth. On the upside, I lost a ton of weight in almost no time. But it was miserable. It was miserable because I absolutely love bread. In fact, there are few things that I like more than a nice chunk of tasty bread with maybe a little cheese, preferably something blue or smoky, to go with it.

My favorite bread is challah. It's dense but still soft in texture, a little sweet but nothing overpowering. And, because it's braided, a loaf of challah just looks beautiful.

Over the break, I learned to make challah. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. I had a good recipe to follow, and it even gave me pictures to illustrate the whole process of braiding. But, even though it wasn't too difficult and even though the instructions were very clear, there was still some mystery to the whole process of making bread. I had to mix together all of these simple ingredients--eggs, water, oil, yeast, honey, flour--and expect that, simple as these things are, they would be transformed into a beautiful loaf of challah.

It seemed a little far-fetched to believe it could happen, and my patience and faith in the recipe were, of course, put to the test while I waited for the bread to rise. But it did rise, puffed up by yeast, only to be punched down, reworked, cut into four pieces, braided, coated with an egg wash, and placed in the oven. And, all of those simple ingredients really did transform into a loaf of challah.

The whole process is a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, there's a good explanation of the process of making bread, something that makes sense of how the yeast reacts to the heat and the moisture. But, making bread requires a bit of faith and a bit of patience. It requires careful consideration and attention to the weather, the humidity, the heat of the room. None of these things can be left to chance or the ingredients won't become what they're intended to be. If the dough is too sticky or too dry, it's difficult to braid, and then the beauty of the challah is lost, because it's in those confusing braided knots that the bread has its densest texture and its real aesthetic.

Even though I can appreciate the mystery of bread making, I'm not generally one who loves mystery. I like to understand things, to know the answer to things, right now. Sometimes this is a negative trait. I sometimes try, almost compulsively, to make sense of things, to understand things even when there is no ready explanation. This is a very difficult trait to deal with when one is thinking about God, and it was a trait that became apparent as I sensed that God was trying to get my attention.

When I say that I wasn't happy about returning to Christianity, I'm not lying. I was confused about what it meant to be a Christian, and I wasn't really sure I wanted to be one. I mean, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be one of those Christians for whom Christianity actually meant something, one of those Christians who really believed it all. There was a conversation that played in my head. Sometimes it was a conversation with God; sometimes it was a conversation with myself. But, it went something like this:

"Fine, I'll be a Christian. I'll stop doing whatever God says I shouldn't do. I'll start going to church. I'll pray. I'll believe in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit. I'll say and actually believe the Apostles' Creed. I'll do all of those things, but I'm not going to believe that."

Whatever that was would change, depending on whatever it was that didn't make sense to me or whatever it was that I felt particularly strong about at the moment. That was not just one but many different things. That came up more than once. That came up a lot.

That, whatever it was, had formed a strong barrier around my heart, and it was working very hard to only let in those things which made sense to me, sense as I had understood it for so long. But, there must have been some cracks in this barrier. Because, as I began to pray and read my Bible and talk to other people (like those Christians who actually believed this stuff), that came to make less sense to me than God's Word.

And, somewhere along the way, I learned that I was believing all this stuff, not because I felt obligated to out of fear, but because I felt compelled to out of love. As Donald Miller writes in Searching for God Knows What:

"Jesus was always, and I mean always, talking about love, about people, about relationships, and He never broke anything into steps or formulas. What if, because we were constantly trying to dissect His message, we were missing a blatant invitation? I began to wonder if becoming a Christian did not work more like falling in love than agreeing with a list if true principles...What if the gospel of Jesus was an invitation to know God?" (46).

I love how he writes this because, though I really believe in those true principles, they don't make sense to me out of the context of love. And, when I found a love for God and a love for Jesus, I finally found a love for His true principles. The conversation in my head continued, but my protests were answered with, well, truth. I came to see God's love for me, for all of us, in His rules. And, when I started to see it as love, He started to show me answers. It's as if I, puffed up with all my understanding and intellect, would refuse to believe, only to be punched down and reworked. Allowed to become that which I was intended to be.

And, I think that is the mystery that we can't understand until we somehow find that love or, perhaps, allow ourselves to feel that love, to let that love come through the cracks in the barriers that guard our hearts. Because, when I felt that love, I didn't feel as if I was following a set of rules or believing a set of principles that had no purpose or made no sense. It felt more like accepting the mystery of God and His Word and asking Him to explain who He is to me, rather than me trying to tell Him who He is or trying to lean on my own understanding.

It seems that when we make it through the mystery, through the confusing times, while still holding onto a faith that God is true and faithful to His Word, that we move closer to really loving Him. We begin to understand that those confusing times contain the greatest joy of discovery, the greatest depth of truth. Sometimes it is when we hold onto faith through those most confusing times that we really learn to be faithful to a God who always will be faithful to us.