Matthew 13:33 reads – “He told them still another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough’.” That’s a lot of dough for one woman to knead. Whenever I read this parable I think of my grandmother. During the Depression in the 1930s she rose most days between 3:30 and 4:00 AM to bake bread for a nearby boarding house where railroad workers lived. She usually baked three days per week and during the other days, she did the laundry for the boarding house – by hand with a washboard. My grandfather had constructed an outdoor brick oven that was large enough to bake a dozen loaves of bread at a time. She often baked about forty loaves of bread. These loaves were not the small loaves that we normally buy today in a grocery store, but were large, in the shape of a tire. The muscles in her hands, arms, and across her back felt like a man’s when she hugged me when I was a child. The amount of flour that the woman in the parable mixed is ridiculous; but so was the amount that my grandmother mixed during the early morning hours of her long days.
Todd Rivetti 