If Our Lives Were Like a Good Beach Read

When I left full-time church ministry, I wasn’t sure what I would do next. So I taught myself how to bake bread. Already loving to bake cookies, brownies, and pumpkin bread, it wasn’t surprising that I fell in love with this new endeavor. With a bread baker’s cookbook Tony had given me for my birthday, I experimented with all kinds of recipes. I tried making Challah, Potato Rosemary, and Ciabatta—in addition to sandwich bread. And found,

I love every part of baking bread.

I love the feel of the dough in my hands as I knead it. I feel a sense of pride when the dough puffs up and rises, telling me the yeast is doing its job. And the smell of bread baking fills our apartment in the most heavenly way. It is wonderful.

So, it also wasn’t surprising when I started dreaming of becoming a baker. For a few short months, I toyed with the idea. I looked into the local culinary schools and even asked a bakery downtown if they were hiring (which they weren’t). And, soon, for a variety of reasons, I decided starting a bakery wasn’t in my immediate future.

But recently, I read one of those idyllic beach reads, and all my desires to start a bakery came rushing back. This lovely little book, set in England, began with a main character who was down on her luck. Her business had just folded and she felt adrift. Having to move out of her expensive apartment, she finds a much more affordable place to rent in a nearby, rundown town.

Like me, this character loves to bake. Almost immediately, she starts making bread in her small kitchen. The scent travels out of her windows to her neighbors who start asking her to bake them bread. In the town, there is only one other place to get bread, but it is awful. So, before she knows what is happening, she is in business.

As if this story couldn’t get any more ideal—or cheesy—the main character then becomes friends with a millionaire. After just one day of hanging out, he buys her a large wood burning oven to bake her bread. The only thing that would make this story better, would be if I told you that she marries him in the end. But alas, her love life turns out to be a little bit more complex—only, not much.

As I finished the last page of the book, I thought how easy would life be if all our dreams came that simply. If we could just start doing what we love, people would offer to pay for it, and then we’d get a fairy godmother/millionaire to come fund our outfit—life would be a dream. Emphasis on dream. But you know where this is going.

When we are doing what we’re meant to do, it’s not always easy. In fact there are whole seasons when it is hard—when things are messy, unsure, and challenging. When there is more we have to learn than we realized. And sometimes, when we’re not even sure we’ll make it.

Often, we see these scary and difficult times as signs that we should give up. But what I have been learning in the process of starting my own business, is that all of these things are normal. They’re not warnings to give up (at least not in most cases), rather they are the very experiences that will grow us into the people and creators we most want to be.

When I finished reading the book about the bakery, I thought, “This fictional girl is living my life.” (Not the over the top love story part, the bakery part) But then I remembered all the things I wanted more than starting a bakery, and all the things I am learning from creating a business in the real world—and I was thankful. Sometimes, we want our lives to be like our favorite beach reads, but deep down we know, there are important parts of our reality we’d miss.