Partnership

Our sourdough starter died this week. We’re not sure how or why, but I probably left it out too long without feeding it, and now we’re spending a portion of our morning and evening trying to revive it. What’s interesting about a sourdough starter is that it’s just two things: flour and water. Someone in the Middle East centuries ago mixed the two and left them out for too long, eventually realizing that the mixture fermented and bubbled. I’m not sure how that person then realized that this mixture could be used to leaven bread (at what point do you decide to mix a smelly water and flour paste into more flour and water and bake it?), but someone tried it and this became the way bread was made for centuries afterward. If you maintain your starter, throwing some of it out each day and adding more flour and water to ferment, you can create something that lasts for years. Some have been passed down for centuries. 

Clearly, ours isn’t strong enough to even go a year. But we’re committed to reviving it, and even now I can see a few bubbles at the surface of our mixture. As I prayed (yes, prayed) this morning that God would bring our starter back to life, I began to think about the process. Flour, water, and a warm, nurturing environment, combined to create the basis of my favorite food: bread. Bread is a foundational food, in my own life but also throughout history. The biblical narratives written about bread seem endless, and I could eat it endlessly. When my Sunday school teacher in elementary school said that “man cannot live on bread alone,” I raised my hand and said , “oh, I could definitely live on bread alone.” Give me warm, homemade sourdough and some Irish butter and I’m set for life.

And in this foundational recipe, two ingredients: flour and water. Two partners, working together to create something entirely new and alive. Partnership was my second word of the year when I got married to my husband in 2025, and I’ll admit I knew nothing at all about the process. I saw two completely different people, and sometimes had no vision at all for what might change when we came together to form a new life. I saw my life (flour) and his life (water), and that was it. Like a woman centuries ago who only knew to make flat bread, I didn’t have any concept for the change that would begin to occur as we consistently fed our marriage, little by little, every day. 

Marriage has surprised me. Like that first person to discover leavened bread, I had no idea that our two personalities and callings coming together could create something completely new and unprecedented. There was no way of knowing what our marriage would be before we got married, which scared me. Now, only one year in, I am seeing the glimmers of what our life-starter might be forming in each of us. Our marriage has become a living thing, something that can, of course, die if neglected, but that can also be brought back to life with care and commitment. Our marriage has created a home. But more than that, our marriage has begun to form a collective vocation. What I brought to the table and what Michael brought to the table are now turning into something neither of us could have foreseen or managed on our own — it is becoming a leaven for our lives, causing everything it’s mixed into to rise. 

I see, now, how a good marriage can change a family’s legacy. A couple I know will be married 50 years this month, and their family celebrated them by writing letters about what their marriage has meant to their kids and to their grandkids. It has meant stability, peace, groundedness, love. It is, in fact, something that will be passed down for centuries, a life-starter that will impact everyone their lives are mixed with. And, in a mystery we will never understand, these marriages represent our partnership with God. They speak to living water meeting the flour of our dusty humanness, and creating something we cannot imagine until we actually live it. The kingdom of God is a loaf of bread, Christ in us and with us, partnering with our feeble attempts at righteousness and justice to heal the world in his time; a legacy I find is worth living for.