Daily Bread

With temperatures above 80 and a layer of pollen settling on the minivan, it must be February in middle Georgia. Even as I write this and the sun sets behind the fence, the music filling my ears is that of you three and your daddy playing a game of softball in the backyard. A moment of bliss for you and a moment of quiet for me, and I am savoring it in its fullness.

Right now, it is my portion. It is my daily bread.

Give us this day…

To the right of our piano hangs a picture of a twenty-year old girl in a rib-knit tank top and a pair of very impressive cargo pants, sitting on a street corner with a guitar in her hand and a case open for tips on the sidewalk. She is carefree and laughing as she sings to whomever will listen. So happy. Probably because she can spend three hours straight in her dorm room writing songs to her heart’s content without anyone asking her for help to go tee-tee. She didn’t know how that would change over the next decade…

Last week I sat at the piano and tried to play a song that has been writing itself in my heart for a year. I tried to play it for three hours. The same three hours that my dorm room offered for my songs when I was twenty. But can you guess, over those three hours, how many times I actually played through the entire song?

ZERO.

Feeding your apparently starving bellies…playing the referee in a crucial battle over who had “it” first…answering urgent questions about the size of molecules in a carbohydrate…staunching the flow of blood from tongue-wound on the trampoline…lots of really thrilling things, but not finishing a song on the piano.

Give us this day…

At twenty it was uninterrupted time to think and write and sing and contemplate life and the future. At thirty-four it is the very opposite of that. But at every season it is what I need, no less and no more.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Like the children of Israel sometimes we try to gather too much, think that the manna on the ground today won’t be there tomorrow, wonder if the Provider will really keep His promises, if His mercies really are new every morning. But when we do that, the manna just spoils. Because we don’t know what we need today. But He does.

Whatever we need to face this very day, it is exactly what we have. His grace is sufficient. His mercies are new.

I hope that you will always remember that. Because there will be days when your portion seems too heavy, days when death or poverty or loss are crouching at your doorstep. There will be days when your bread seems too mundane, too far from your dreams or expectations. There will be days when the manna feels like exactly what you want and desire and need, and days when it feels like the last thing in the world you want to gather again in the morning.

But it is enough. It is good and acceptable and perfect and enough. And that is because the Giver is good and acceptable and perfect and enough.

So whether I am singing in front of a crowd or wiping your noses or explaining why it wasn't a good idea to poke your own eye with a carrot, whether I am celebrating in joy or grieving beside the grave, I will chase after contentment in the daily bread, the portion that I am given by my Shepherd. He is a good Shepherd, and it is a good portion.

Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."