The Yeast

The week gets busy.  Dinner needs to be started before the boys get home from school or it all goes to pieces between their needs, checking their folders, overseeing their homework, supplementing to provide what hasn't been covered, and preparing to arrive at whatever activity we are due to attend, preferably at the time we are supposed to attend it.

Such was the case Friday when I breezed in my house at thirteen after three, exactly twenty-two minutes before I usually head to the bus stop.

Friday is always a busy day for me, and this Friday was even moreso.  There had been somewhere to be (for which I was late) all day long.  So when it came time to think of dinner, my brain was kind of stumped.  There wasn't any warm rice, and I wasn't really in the mood for it (I'm never in the mood for warm rice).  I scrounged through my refrigerator, found my left-over low fat/low acidity tomato sauce, and immediately had an idea:  pizza!

The problem was the yeast.  I usually buy a little bottle of the dry yeast because it seems to last longer, and I use much less of it per time.  But I was beginning to think my yeast was dead because the last few times I made pizza, the dough didn't rise.  At all.  Not a bubble.

But a glance at the clock assured me that there was no time to run to the store to pick up anything, and, since I had no other ideas, I rolled my eyes and said a quick prayer, "God, the boys really need dinner, and I'd really appreciate it if the yeast worked today.  I know it's probably my own fault for keeping it too long, but please either let this dough rise or help my children love the pizza with flat dough."

And I mixed up the dough not completely sold on that prayer because it's been a pretty hard summer, and sometimes I wonder if God is listening.

Thirty minutes and two sweaty, talkative, jumping, backpack-slinging boys later, I walked back into the kitchen, and lo and behold my dough had more than doubled.

Bear in mind that the last three--not one, not two, but three--pizzas I made with this same yeast did nothing.  I had kind of been of the opinion that, after the whole Passover thing, God might not be a big yeast fan, but if He can bring even a little budding fungus back from the dead to swell the dough for my boys and then make both of them like the pizza on the same day (unheard of in my house), well, then, maybe He's listening to the rather bigger requests we're making too.