Bread That Keeps

I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. That sentence closes an argument about food, and the argument runs back through four hundred years of desert.

It starts the previous afternoon with lunch. Five thousand men eat, they come looking for him in the morning, and he tells them why they came: ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. They ask for a sign, and the sign they suggest is the one their nation already had. Our fathers did eat manna in the desert.

Go back to that manna and look at the terms it came on. It fell every morning and it would not keep. Some of them left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank. Nobody in that generation ever held a week's supply. Deuteronomy states the purpose of the whole arrangement. He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, and did it so that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only. Then Jesus finishes the argument, and the finish is brutal about the old provision. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. It worked every morning for forty years, and every person it fed is buried in the sand.

One small honest thing today, then. Write down what you reached for first when you woke uneasy, the phone or the person or the plan, and put beside it how many hours it held you. Then read the second half of the verse and notice what the promise attaches to. Coming, and believing.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 78 is Strength and Power (2 Samuel 22:33-34).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two