07/04/2026
A Better Culture
Sunroom Studio Devotional Blog - July 1, 2026
SEED & CANVAS
Scripture:
Matthew 13:33
33He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
Galatians 5:7-9
7You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? 8This persuasion is not from him who calls you. 9A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
I was telling my daughter recently about how hair salons used to smell in the 1980’s. You would open the door of the salon and get hit with a brick of chemical odor so hard that you could almost fall over. Everyone back then was getting a perm, a bleach, a color, and definitely starched style. And the chemistry was not plant-based with natural essential oils. Much was petro-chemical, ammonia, and aerosol alcohols that were effecting the health of stylists in long careers. What began shortly thereafter was a complete revolution and change of culture. Companies like Aveda led the way in changing our approach to health and beauty. Nature-derived chemistries became the cultural standard wherever possible, but it was an intentional move to make these changes and to make it happen.
With health, there is still much of this cultural work to be done, but it goes deeper, into the substance and chemical integration of the food we eat, and an examination on how we are compensating for where we lack.
Anyone who has worked with an Eincorn sourdough starter knows the importance of using filtered water. If tapwater is used, even the trace amount of chlorine in it will completely destroy the starter. The flour will not rise.
To begin with, Eincorn does not raise like modern flour does. It is the original wheat that has more protein, less gluten, and 30% more anti-inflammatory selenium than its modern, genetically-modified counterpart. With these properties, this ancient grain’s starter raises to about 30% of the height of what modern bread starter does, making for a less fluffy bread, but also a less fluffy gut.
The flour is heavier, more sticky, and firm. The bacteria in the culture of this starter needs to work very hard to make that flour rise. It is a strong, healthy bacterial culture that makes a healthy flour work for bread, and in kind, the best type of water and nutrition feeding that culture is also critically essential.
Modern wheat modification and production has allowed us to forgo the detail in these critical elements. And it has kept modern society in the abundance of it’s fluffy bread, yet we marvel at the amount of food allergy, Crohn’s disease, diverticulitis, a**l fissure, colon cancer, and diabetes' that we find proliferating throughout modern human health. Indeed, all of this should have us hoping that the people who produce and oversee our food production are not the very same people who are producing and overseeing our medicine.
And even if we could glean healthy gut bacteria from this modern, competitively yeast-laden bread, we would be diminishing those bacteria strains by the amount of chlorinated tap water that we directly feed our gut through our cooking processes. Truly, our food is only as healthy as our ability to digest it. How far we’ve come from a healthy culture and healthy bread that we could be nourished with.
A similarity in culture can be found with the influence of the arts as well. Spiritual themes, wellness, and health oftentimes do not reach into the mainstream of social culture. Much of the reason is quite necessary due to the separation of religion/church and state. Major arts initiatives and graduate level artists, with themes in religion or spirituality, cannot be easily grant-funded because government funding cannot support such without creating bias in that regard.
Yet spiritual health is necessary for people to be able to adapt in adverse life change and circumstance, and creativity mechanizes such adaption. Health ministers, creative healing practitioners, and religious leaders must be very intentional in sharing faith through the arts. How else might transcendent adaptive meaning and hope reach a culture that will readily self-medicate or doom-scroll if they cannot find it? Regenerative answers are seldom found in pills or addictive online echo chambers. They are more often found with transcendent meaning and inspired reinvention on how to see and do life. And once again, we sit marveling at our country’s culture war, wondering where has the spirit of our people gone? Could it be that we have forgotten something here, like the old wheat that fed us better than we thought, perhaps there was food in reflecting creative meaning back to the creative Master in whose image we were made? Perhaps there was nutrition there that we missed, a culture that we needed, and that we need to recreate? If so, may we be worthy and intentional ministers is such a cause. And may we be blessed as His hands and feet in sharing this grace with others.
Blessings to us all and Amen.
