Five Minute Friday :: Invest

• Five Minute Friday :: Invest Linkup

Because invest has an overwhelming variety of nuances, I'll mainly run with Kate's agricultural picture as today's prompt.

The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land,
a land with flowers streams and springs, valleys and hills,
a land of wheat and barley, vines and fig trees and pomegranates,
a land of olive trees and honey.
Deuteronomy 8:7-8

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,
for the land is mine;
you are but aliens and sojourners with me.
You shall grant redemption of all the land
of your possession.
Leviticus 25:23-24

It's all about the land. The dirt, sod, earth beneath our feet forms a heaven for us to live on. It's about investment and stewardship. You may remember the first humans received land as a gift and then as a task or a charge:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden
to tend and guard and care for it.
Genesis 2:15

Invest conveys a sense of a long time, something not fleeting or ephemeral. You know about investing in stocks or commodities, in an education, in a dream. Some of those involve a long stretch of time; some entail money; some are about human effort and initiative. Some investments are about all of the above. Creation care in general and farming in particular require legal tender, human grunt work and intellectual insight, and dream worthy results don't happen yesterday. Sometimes not even in a year or two. Have you heard, "We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors—we borrow it from our children?" I illustrated it as one of my designs for Earth Day 2010.

Those "children" or descendants are as long-range as Abraham's were. Way beyond grandkids and great nieces. We're talking a few centuries down the line, so they can look back and retrospectively love our investments, maybe be inspired and invest a bit or a lot themselves.

For sure God majorly invested in planet earth by creating land to last, and it's been around near-countless millennia. In Romans 8:19 the apostle Paul reminds us all creation waits for us humans to claim our divine image and start (or continue) to steward creation as lovingly as God would: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." As our Leviticus text insists, the land belongs to God. It's only on loan to us.

• Read the entire passage: Romans 8:18-23

It's about the land so we'll have food. So we'll have shelter and bigger buildings, too. So we'll have transportation, tools, and everything that's made from wood and minerals the land provides us. It's about the land because all creation – not solely human creatures – depends on land and human caretaking of the land in order to live, thrive, and flourish.

How have you invested? What have you invested? What will you invest next? Who do you have in mind as you look into the future?

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Five Minute Friday :: Prove

Family of Breads with legal reuse rights from pxhere

• Five Minute Friday :: Prove Linkup

You need to prove your dough before you put it in the oven to bake it into bread. Yeast ferments a lump of dough – the future loaf! – so it rises and expands in size; we sometimes call that leavening. The rising proofs the dough so it comes out of the oven as lovely appealing bread that actually acts like bread—it tastes great and nourishes us well.

Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all of the dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch of dough, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed for us. Because of this, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of goodness and truth.
1 Corinthians 5:6-8

The Apostle Paul uses an analogy he hopes his listeners and readers will understand when he says malice and evil become a kind of leaven because they tend to spread easily, similar to the way a small amount of yeast will prove an entire loaf. Moving away from Paul's warning, it takes very little yeast to make a whole loaf rise and shine; as we celebrate the festival of resurrection; that's where we're going today as Easter people. The Holy Spirit of Life that raised Jesus from the dead also raises us to new life. We become yeasty leaven for society and for the church. We rise and we shine!

God gives us Broken Bread and Unbroken Word, as a friend in previous city's website proclaims. The loaf has been proven, baked into bread, blessed, broken, and given to us. The Word is part of the proof of God with us, God among us, God for us.

God calls us to live as salt of the earth. Light of the world. Leaven of society. You've probably experienced how a tiny packet of yeast makes its way through the loaf and proves the whole entire thing? Our lives function the same way. And just as you can add more yeast if it looks like your bread isn't rising, why not take along a companion to help increase the leavening?

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