Daily Bread...

In the course of their Bible reading, a married couple ran across Ezekiel 4:9 - "Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself."

"This is amazing," the man said, "We've got to try it out!"

"But it doesn't give us the amounts of each ingredient," the woman objected.

"Well, we'll just use equal portions."

And so they did, and when they were through they had a loaf of something that was not much like anything they had ever called "bread." But they didn't give up - they decided to continue experimenting, and eventually it grew into sort of a contest between them to see who could come up with the better loaf of bread using God's ingredients.

"Maybe the list is in order like the ingredients on a label," the wife thought, and so she made a lot of attempts using different proportions of ingredients. The husband decided he would try the historical approach and so he researched and found that "beans" might refer to carob, so he tried powdered carob.

Meanwhile the wife thought that perhaps the storage jar was actually a sprouting jar, so she experimented with sprouting the grains. Not satisfied with any results thus far, the husband delved in further and discovered that the loaves were probably baked in a clay oven fired by acacia wood. He did his best to duplicate this process.

The wife was by now trying every possible combination of sprouted and unsprouted, ground and whole grains.

Finally the man gave up. "I quit," he announced one day. "I've just decided that the Bible was talking about dry, smoky-tasting flat blobs of grainy stuff. I'll get used to them, somehow."

"Wait," his wife replied, "I have one more idea to try out."

"What is it?" her husband wanted to know.

"I'm not ready to tell you - let me just try it first."

And so she went into the kitchen, mixed up her ingredients, did all the necessary punching and waiting and so on, and finally put the loaf in the oven - the kitchen one, not the clay monstrosity in the back yard - to bake. All through the day the husband was tantalized by the delicious smell as the bread rose and as it baked. It was quite different from any of the batches either of them had previously mixed-up, and he couldn't identify the source of the improvement, although it seemed somehow familiar. Finally the bread was done, and together they removed the pan from the oven, and then the loaf from the pan. It looked perfect - rounded nicely on top and browned to just the right shade.

"What did you do to it?" the husband asked.

"Just wait - let's see how it slices."

Oh, and it sliced just perfectly. Inside the bread was evenly fine-grained and not at all rubbery.

"How did you do that?" the husband demanded.

"Just wait - let's see how it tastes," she replied.

It tasted even better than it looked and smelled - hearty whole-grain flavor and melt-in-your mouth texture.

"OK," the husband said, "What's the secret? This bread is just the best ever - it's like manna or something."

"Well," she replied, "I added a teaspoon and a half of yeast."

"You did WHAT?" he sputtered, spitting out a bite of bread as though she had just informed him he was eating the forbidden fruit.

"I added a little yeast," she repeated.

"But the Bible doesn't say anything about yeast! There isn't any yeast in that verse! What in the world made you think you could add yeast?

"Well," she hesitated, "to tell you the truth, I've sort of changed my view of the Bible."

Now the man was totally incensed. "You WHAT? Don't you realize that the Bible is God's inspired Word - without error? What the heck do you mean you've changed your view of the Bible?"

"Umm," she mumbled nervously, "I decided maybe it isn't a very good cookbook."