Daily Manna · Day 165 · June 14
Meat in Due Season
“The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season.”
"Give us this day our daily bread."
That is the request Jesus taught, and the odd word in it is daily. Not weekly, not a stock, not a year's security. The psalm underneath it says the same thing in another key. The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season.
Follow the idea and it runs the length of Scripture. Manna fell every morning, and anyone who gathered extra to cover tomorrow found that it bred worms and stank. Elijah is fed by ravens at a brook, morning and evening, and then the brook dries up, deliberately, and he is sent to a widow with one meal left in her house. Israel is told he suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, and the reason given is that man doth not live by bread only. Every one of those is provision. Not one of them is a supply you could sit on.
Which is what in due season concedes, and it should be said plainly instead of smoothed over. There is a stretch where the eyes are up and the hands are empty. The psalm does not pretend otherwise.
And that is where the danger is, so here it is without decoration. The wait is exactly the place where people stop looking up and start reaching sideways. Israel wanted Egypt back within weeks of walking through the sea. Abram had a promise and ten years of silence and took the shortcut his household suggested, and Genesis spends chapters on the wreckage. The risk in a long wait is almost never that God forgets to open his hand. It is that you get tired of holding yours out and take whatever is within reach.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 165 is Fifteen Years (2 Kings 20:5).