The Year My Sourdough Starter (Nearly) Died

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A few days ago, I dug my sourdough starter out from the back of the basement fridge, lifted off the tea towel, and found it was black and hard as stone. I said, Of course.

This would be the year my starter died.

My biologist friend had told me just last week that it’s quite impossible to kill a starter, because it’s quite impossible to kill a bacteria. Well, I am not a biologist, and somehow (I thought) I did.¹

Giving up on breadmaking, I walked down to the garden on grass burnt by September that hurt my feet. I found two little tomatoes among the weeds. There were fat zinnias, too. Cucumbers, melons, and zucchini this year all nearly shriveled before they came. I talked to my grandma Naomi about this in her kitchen a few days ago, how it just wasn’t the year for tomatoes. She told me that she used to pickle something like 100 quarts of cucumbers straight from the garden, and I pointed toward the window. 

“That garden?” I asked.

“That garden.”

Clearly, this wasn’t the year for pickles either. Then again, we seem to say that every year. Last year, it was the heat and drought. This year, we’re blaming it on the rain and the cicadas. 

And then there were the bees. 

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I prayed fervently and often for the honeybees this year, from the time Jared cracked open his hives to see if they’d braved the winter, to the mating flights of the queens in spring, to the honey harvest in June, when it flowed from the big extractors like it was the Promised Land. It was going to be a good year. The Lord had established all the hard work (and stings) of our hands. 

Jared left me a voice recording one morning in July, and I had to sit down on the edge of my bed to take it. The bees had died, half of them, he said. Maybe more. Something had killed the colonies we’d trailored out to the bottomlands, and when Jared checked on them that morning, their tongues were lolling out. 

This time, I didn’t think, Of course. This was not my abandoned starter, left in the fridge for months. This wasn’t even the garden, which I’d worked to cultivate in spring, then gotten busy and left untended. The bees were our earnings and savings, the work of our (especially Jared’s) hands, the crop we planted and hoped to be reaping for years to come. We’d been building a business around them, bottling their honey, labeling jars, selling at farmer’s markets, and planning to do much more.

And so this was the year the bees died, too.

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Before this begins to sound like An Obituary Of All We Once Loved, this was also the year I learned something profound – something truly lifegiving – about how God works:

Sometimes, things die that we meant to grow, and sometimes, things live that we never planted. 

“The September garden is a mess, but you sure get some pretty things out of it,” I said at the dinner table the other night, looking proudly at a bouquet I’d arranged of zinnias, marigolds, and goldenrod. It was hard to believe that had come from that garden. 

In the box of dying tomatoes, there are fat, round cantaloupe growing which I never planted (and honestly didn’t even know grew in our climate). Where the zucchini patch was supposed to be, the marigolds have plumed into a burning bush the bees are feasting on.

Sometimes, things die that we meant to grow, and sometimes, things live that we never planted. 

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Less than two weeks after his bees died, Jared applied for a part-time position as a hospital chaplain. He’d been job-hunting off and on for months, but this one dropped out of the sky like manna, and he grabbed it. Within a month, he had landed the position—one that fits his skills beautifully. 

There is something to be said for harvesting something you didn’t plant, and maybe even for planting something you’ll never harvest. I planted tomatoes; melons grew. Instead of zucchini, the marigolds overflowed their banks. A chaplaincy is not what we planted in winter, but it is what grew. And because it is “God who gives the growth,” it is better than what we set out to harvest. 

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I realize it’s only September, and there is still much left in the world and my heart that might die. Good, I say. Of course. This is the way of the Gardener, who will be tending and pruning my heart until sanctification gives way to glorification—when death is no more, and there’s nothing left but bread and ripe tomatoes in a land flowing with milk and honey.

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“Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.”

~ Habakkuk 3:17-19

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¹ As it turns out, it really is quite impossible to kill a starter, and you might be pleased to know that after a few days of tending and feeding, it was back to its old self.