The Need to Knead

The creative calling is present from the very beginning of time. In words that echo through the ages, God intones, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Then Moses reports, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:26-27). Humans are thus made “in the image of God.” 

Untold amounts of ink have been spilled over this concept of the imago Dei. Customarily when we think of what it means to be made in God’s likeness, what comes to mind are features like our human capacity for reasoning, perhaps, or memory or language—all of which are true and essential to our image-of-God-ness. But there’s still more. 

The most salient feature of God’s likeness that is reflected in the beginning is precisely his creativity. Consider how we name him in the first article of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The Psalms often speak of this, perhaps most famously in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (emphasis added). Or Psalm 95: “For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land” (Ps 95:3-5). 

The book of Job beautifully expresses the creative nature of God. For instance, when the long-suffering man is questioned by the Lord about his work of creation: 

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7) 

God’s heart for creativity is also reflected in early Israel: Bezalel, son of Uri. Bezalel is the first person in the Bible to be described as filled with the Spirit. What’s especially remarkable about this is that he is neither a prophet nor a priest, much less a king. No, Bezalel is a craftsman: 

See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. (Ex 31:2-5) 

Bezalel (along with his right-hand man, Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach) is no mere handyman. He’s an artist, called and equipped by God to spearhead the erection of the tabernacle, the Lord’s dwelling place with humankind, and its furnishings. The example of Bezalel is a stirring affirmation of the creative calling and the godly potential for working with your hands. 

Time would fail us to tell of the countless believers through the ages who have faithfully reflected the heart of God through their creative labors: the cathedrals constructed by myriad anonymous saints, the icons of Rublev, the dramas of Dickens, the cantatas of that musical evangelist Johann Sebastian Bach, who offered up the works of his hands unto the Lord, signing them S.D.G.—soli Deo gloria, “To God alone be the glory.” 

Ours is a God for whom creativity is at the heart of his very being. Whoever else God is for us, he is undeniably also the divine artist, the agent of cosmic creativity.

This is the God in whose image you have been made. Your very essence reflects a Creator who not only delights in the work of his hands—the product of his creativity—but also, if we can put it this way, the very task of working with his divine hands—the process of creativity. You can’t read Job, for instance, without getting the impression that God really enjoys this stuff. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when we, as his human creatures, also enjoy working with our hands and being creative. 

You may have a creative vocation for your livelihood. But even if you work with your hands as an avocation, that doesn’t make it frivolous, not by a long shot. It’s an elemental expression of the imago Dei within you. “We are [God’s] workmanship,” Paul writes in Ephesians, “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph 2:10). We are labors of love, laboring in love.

Amid the dreary days of pandemic lockdowns, a surprising product began disappearing from grocery store shelves. No, not toilet paper. (That wasn’t especially surprising). I speak of yeast, one of the essential ingredients for baking bread. (Along these lines, King Arthur Baking Co. reported that it sold more than 156 million pounds of flour in 2020, as sales rose 61 percent over the year before.) An unexpected byproduct of the pandemic, it seems, was a resurgence of home bakers. 

Alas, the boom was short-lived; already by 2021 there were 195 million fewer home-baked goods (including a sharp 28 percent decline in homemade bread), which dipped even below pre-pandemic levels. Baking bread serves well as both example of and metaphor for the value of working with your hands. 

To begin with, baking bread is simple, slow, and scriptural. First, it’s simple. Bread requires only four ingredients, which are inexpensive and (pandemic conditions aside) easy to come by: flour, water, and salt, as well as yeast. You need no fancy tools, especially if you knead by hand. A basic kitchen oven will suffice for the baking itself. More than anything, bread just takes time—which points to the second reason I commend it to you. 

Baking bread does take time. It is inherently a slow process. “Instant yeast” notwithstanding, you can’t eliminate the period of fermentation in which the dough is rising and the flavor is forming. Crucially, this process itself is essential to the final product; as baker and author Peter Reinhart observes, “Fermentation is the single most important stage in the creation of great bread." Like the gestation of a baby or the percolation of a pot of coffee, fermentation just takes the time it takes (In his book 4,000 Weeks, Oliver Burkeman introduced me to the delightful German term eigenzeit, which is roughly translated as “the time inherent to the process itself.") 

Third, I would be remiss not to mention the rich scriptural resonance of bread. As we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, bread is the epitome of God’s daily provision of our creaturely needs (Mt 6:11; cf. Ps 104:15). Bread recalls his miraculous care for Israel in the wilderness (Ex 16), even as we recognize that bread alone cannot supplant his word (Deut 8:3; Lk 4:4). Finally, in the Eucharist bread becomes the supernatural vehicle of Christ’s sacramental presence (1 Cor 10:16)—he who himself professed to be “the Bread of Life” (Jn 6:48). In short, the humble art of baking bread connects us to the exalted horizons of transcendent truth. 

So if you are looking for a simple starting point for folding in more creativity into your everyday life, I encourage you to make a visit to the baking aisle at your local market. Baking bread is easy to do, facilitates a salutary slowdown, and roots you in the biblical narrative. Not to mention it’s delicious, and your family and friends will thank you!

Baking bread is not only a method for working with your hands, however; it’s also a metaphor that illuminates the curative powers of creativity more generally. 

Consider the process of baking bread at its most elemental level (For the following reflections, I am indebted to Peter Reinhart, especially his book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and his interview with Ken Myers in the Mars Hill Audio journal conversation, “Bread and the Hungry Soul,” April 1, 1995.) You start with flour, which is essentially dead and pulverized grain (usually wheat). The flour is mixed with water and salt to make a lifeless lump of clay. Then, you inject leaven (such as yeast), a word that literally means “to raise up.” That lump of clay is now a living organism: your labor breathes into it the breath of life, bringing forth into the world something that before did not exist. And then, with time and heat, that vital ball of dough will be transformed—glorified, you might say—in order to create the gratuitous, delectable gift of bread. 

The metaphysical drama unfolding in this process is unmistakable. While some of its features are unique to bread baking, the general contours are commensurate with most any expression of creative handiwork. In creativity, as J. R. R. Tolkien suggested in his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories,” we act as “sub-creators” (J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories.” The essay is available in the public domain at several sites online.) Only God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, but we enter into his labor when we work with our hands, whether the fruit of our creativity is a sourdough loaf, an entertaining story, or a purring engine. 

Another benefit of creating is that it asserts what psychologists call the sense of personal agency. Quiet desperation saps your hope by sucking your purpose; it sets in when we feel as though our little lives fail to make a mark on the world. Creative labor, then, stands as an objective refutation to the claim it’s all in vain. (Interestingly, an optional latter stage of the bread-baking process is known as “proofing.”) Like the proud Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) in Cast Away after he successfully puts his hands to making that most elemental of creations—fire—we also can stand back with an awed and grateful sense of accomplishment: “I have baked this loaf! I have built this shelf!” 

And last but certainly not least, the blessed gratuitousness of creativity is not to be neglected. Though we pray that our Father would “give us this day our daily bread,” strictly speaking we can subsist on less glorious fodder; many humans have and do. But a beautiful and tasty loaf of bread, like all creative handiwork, is an affirmation of the inherent wonder and goodness of being alive. The sheer fact of created existence is grace, and creativity taps into that reality. As Martin Luther writes in his Small Catechism on the first article of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe that God has made me together with all creatures . . . and all this He has done out of His divine, fatherly goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me.” Bread says, it’s all good. 

We all have the need to knead. We all have been made in the image of the Almighty Maker, endowed with the urge to create. For you it might not be in the kitchen but instead at the sewing machine, in the shop, or outside in the garden. In whatever way or place our creativity takes shape, the key is to embrace our identity as sub-creators who can offer up the works of our hands, however small, to the glory of God.

Adapted from The Quiet Ambition by Ryan Tinetti. ©2025 by Ryan Tinetti. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.