This afternoon, I share a reflection written by a co-sojourner. I found it inspiring and wise at this moment in history - when the chaos and darkness loom large. It all makes me wonder what large thing I should be doing in response, to push back the darkness with light and hope. But maybe what I am being called to isn't large. But small. Kat Armas, believes that.
it begins with a woman
by KAT ARMAS
The first time I baked bread with my three-year-old, I wondered if she’d remember it years from now. Her small hands pressed into the dough, her laugh cutting through the stillness of the afternoon. There was flour in the air, on the floor, in her hair. I remember watching her, this tiny human so full of delight, and thinking how simple and sacred it was to teach her how to make something meant to nourish.
I don’t know if she’ll carry that memory with her, but I hope she carries the feeling of it—what it is to create something that sustains, to know that her hands are capable of such quiet abundance.
I think about that often when I read the words of Jesus. When he wanted to explain the kingdom of God, he didn’t speak of kings or armies, as so many would have expected. He didn’t summon images of thrones or dominion or men wielding swords.
Instead, he told them about a woman.
A woman who took a little yeast, worked it into the dough, and waited for it to rise. It’s such a subversive image, almost startling in its ordinariness.
Here was a crowd waiting for grandeur and conquest, for words about power and might. But Jesus offered them a picture of a woman’s hands in dough, her labor unseen, her work slow and patient. And that, he said, is what the kingdom of God is like.
It’s striking how much restraint it takes to see God in something so small. Empires demand spectacle—monuments, wars, rulers who conquer and crush. But Jesus spoke of something quieter, hidden, something growing in secret until it transforms everything around it.
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There’s power in the fact that Jesus chose to center a woman in this story. Not as a queen or a warrior, not as someone standing in the shadow of a king. A woman as she is, in the fullness of her ordinary life, shaping bread that will feed her community. There’s no conquest here, only creation. No domination, only nourishment.
Empires always ask us to look up—to thrones, to banners, to the illusion of greatness. But the kindom of God asks us to look closer. It is there, in the hands of women baking bread, in the small and unseen work that sustains life. It surprises us in its simplicity, its humanity, and it always leaves us with more than enough.
Grace and peace and courage to you,
Ruth
