“A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”

‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5‬:‭9‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

Did you know that in most self-rising flour, if you have 14 kg of flour, you only need 1.4 g of a leavening agent? 

That’s 1.4% of the flour’s weight to make a self-rising flour. In some sourdough recipes, you can use at least 6% of yeast in the recipe.

Now, I’m not a baker…but I am an archer. So in archer terms, it’s like your nock (where you put your arrow) being off by 1 inch. To many people that doesn’t seem much when you can have a bow string that is averagely 60ish inches. But for an archer that inch can mean A LOT.

At least for me it did. You see, in that 1 inch my nock was off, I lost a lot. I lost a lot of time in trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I lost a lot of arrows. I lost confidence in my skills, and I lost trust in my bow.

Then today as I was shooting, I was next to a child archer. The coach (who happened to be the range manager at the time) happened to see me shoot. And said, “Hey, your nock is off, let me fix that.” 

Now I had been shooting for a few minutes and had found my rhythm, but hey, he was willing to help so why not?

 I gave him my bow and let him change my nock. As he did, I looked at my surviving arrows. They were nicked, scratched, and on one of them the fletching (feathers) were barely hanging on. Unless you are on intense ranges, with proper care and maintenance, arrows can last a lot longer than the six months I had mine. Again I had to question myself and lose money with maintenance as well as obtaining new arrows. 

What was I doing wrong?!?

Then the manager gave me my bow back and had me try it. Immediately, everyone noticed that something was different about my shots. One, my shots were a lot higher. Two, they were a lot faster too. Third thing (well things), which I could only tell were that the shot felt better, the arrows were more at eye level, and I didn’t have to use my shoulders as much. 

It was fixed!!

Not quite. I did, and do, have to retrain my body to adapt to the new aim sight. As well as relax my body, let go of the control that seeped through in my frustration to find out what was wrong. Do my shots hit the bullseye? No. Are they more consistent? Oh yeah!

Figuring out what was wrong didn’t automatically make me a better archer. Mindful practice, patient learning, and more mindful practice do. Though, I was able to be more presently mindful in practice when I realized that not only could I trust my bow, but I had someone looking out for me.

In our lives, there are a lot of little, or big, things that can ruin moments, sometimes periods, of our lives. Sometimes we will have answers, sometimes we won’t. Sometimes solutions are just a one and done recorrection. Sometimes… solutions are a series of mindful recorrections that are done over a long period of time. But we still have to keep going and shooting our shots in life. Frustration can seep in, we can lose a lot in those moments. We can even give up and stop shooting all together. We will still be losing even if we don’t take the shot.

God is not a God that loses. In fact, He already won. Now He, is with us asking us to trust Him, to give Him our shots, and He will take them far. He is the ultimate winner.

It’s easy to forget that in that deep sense of loss (of people, money, confidence, etc.) and frustration. It’s easy for us to hold onto our things or just throw them away. It’s easy to give up and lose.

But if I never kept trying, if I never gave up my bow to be fixed, I would have never gotten the chance to see what my bow could do again. I wouldn’t have this new confidence. It’s not the confidence from before but it’s the confidence that I can keep going and have help.

We won’t get what we lost. That lump that is too leaven is already risen. The crooked shoots were already taken. But now, I have God.

With God, I can relearn, reform, recorrect, I can trust Him. And He, well, He believes in me, us, you. No matter the mistake, or miscalculation, or loss, He is there for you and waiting to help you when you hand things over to Him.