The yeasty scent of bread fresh from the oven fills my daughter’s kitchen. It turns my thoughts back to 2012 when my granddaughter Anneliese and I baked biscuits but had to make sour milk with vinegar. We watched bubbles rise and expand, and marveled as they created foam on the surface of the liquid. Five-year-old Anneliese wrinkled her nose at the pungent smell of sour milk filling the air. Do I wrinkle my nose at the smell of rot that permeates our culture and perhaps my life?
Leaven, the Scriptures tell us, is filled with ungodly things. “Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” 1 Corinthians 5:8.
Every year my Jewish friend Carol searched for leaven throughout her house prior to Passover. What a good physical reminder of looking at our hearts. Her humble attitude echoed Exodus 12:19 “For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land.” How she wanted to have nothing in her that smacked of the world. She also went before all her friends at the season of repentance and asked if she had offended any of us.
Glancing back at a devotional I wrote about our cooking adventure in 2012 I’m reminded of the yeasty things in life. My concordance took me to Genesis 27:17 and Rebecca and Jacob’s deception. Rebecca’s savory foods of roasted meat and fresh bread appealed to the senses and appetite but were used to manipulate not to sustain life. The offering was not a provision but a trap like meat placed in a pit on jungle floors to capture leopards.
I am ensnared by the thought—what am I captured by? What bubbles up in my mind when I rise in the morning, sit in the quiet of dusk or iron a bit of cloth I’m turning into a quilt? Is my life flooded with the leaven of this world?
In Genesis 28:20 Jacob bargains with God. “If God will be with me, keep me…give me bread and garments to wear…21 and I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God.” So, the deal is, if God performs for me as I wish I will serve Him.
The voices of the mob thrust at me through TV and the sounds of the chaos that the world revels in assault me daily. What voices do I heed? “Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” 1 Corinthians 5:6. And again the Scriptures say, “Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Matthew 16:12.
In the bubbles of untruth the world floats.
“Have bags will travel” should be Jeanette-Marie Mirich’s life’s theme. She moved twenty-two times before settling in her first home. An Oregonian by birth who graduated with a B.S. degree in education from Portland State University, Jeanette has swum in the Ligurian Sea and collected shells and sea glass along the Indian Ocean, Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean Oceans, Straits of Malacca, Gulf of Mexico and the Andaman Sea. Her peripatetic lifestyle is courtesy of the U.S. Air Force and her husband’s medical training.
I shouldn’t have made the promise when Harry was dying, but…
You know how it is. You want to please when the person you’ve always loved is hooked up to plastic tubing looking peaky.
Delilah Morgan, a woman of honor, is unable to ignore her promise to her husband, Harry, which leads to trouble, with a capital T. The beautiful, unassuming Delilah plans to mourn in private after Harry passed, but he had other ideas—specifically, leaving his wife in good hands and protected from the elite of their small Kentucky town. However, he neglects to include his wife in his plans.
Harry has selected local judge, Lyle Henderson, the heart-throb of most of the women in town, to court his widow. The judge acquiesces to Harry’s wishes until Henderson’s life spins into a maelstrom after the discovery of bodies in his long absent wife’s car. The police and FBI begin to suspect him of murdering his wife and her apparent lover.
Determined to clear the judge of murder, Delilah resolves to hunt down the true story in an adventure that nearly costs them their lives.
