Once upon a time, there were two men, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Thompson, both seriously ill in the same room in a hospital. Both had to be kept unusually quiet and still - no reading, no radio, certainly no television and no visitors. Their only entertainment was to talk to each other.
Mr. Thompson had to spend all his time flat on his back. Mr. Wilson, on the other hand, as part of his treatment, was allowed to sit up in bed for an hour each day. His bed was next to the window, and every afternoon, when he was propped up for his hour, he would pass the time by describing to Mr. Thompson what he could see outside. And Mr. Thompson began to live for those hours. Mr. Wilson would look out the window and describe ...
- a beautiful park with a lake, where there were ducks and swans and children throwing them bread and sailing model boats;
- softball games and football games and kites flying;
- flowers and trees and stretches of grass and young lovers walking hand-in-hand;
- the skyline of the city off in the distance and the cars and horse-drawn carriages making their way through the park.
One day there was a parade, and Mr. Wilson described every float, every band and all the participants in the procession. Mr. Thompson listened intently, enjoying every minute. He could visualize everything Mr. Wilson described.
Then one afternoon, Mr. Thompson thought to himself: "Just wait a minute! Why should Wilson have all the fun? Why does he have all the pleasure? Why does he get to be by the window?" In a few days, Mr. Thompson turned sour. He was bitter, angry, resentful. He brooded and seethed. He became obsessed with wanting to be by the window! And each passing hour, he became more and more resentful of Mr. Wilson.
Then one night, quite suddenly, Mr. Wilson died. His body was taken away the next morning. As soon as it seemed decent, Mr. Thompson asked if he could be moved to the bed next to the window. So they moved him, tucked him in, made him quite comfortable and left him alone. The minute they were gone, Mr. Thompson struggled to prop himself up on one elbow so he could look out the window. Imagine his surprise. It faced a blank brick wall!
Daily bread. Mr. Thompson was being fed “daily bread” and he didn’t even recognize what was going on.
Have you missed any installments of daily bread lately?
Howard Edington of Nashville tells this story. He writes: Late one Sunday night, as my uncle, Andrew Edington (a college president and Bible teacher) was returning home, he stopped at a roadside diner in a Texas hill country town to snag a quick cup of coffee. As is typical of all the Edington males, he quickly used all the sugar packets the waitress had left on the table for him, but wanted more. As the waitress came near his table again, he called out, "I want some more sugar, please." The crusty old gal defiantly put her hands on her hips, leaned over toward him and snapped, "Stir what you got!" [Howard Edington, Downtown Church: The Heart of the City (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 27-28.]
Have you been stirring what you got?
Sometimes we pray for daily bread and its sweetness is right before us. We just don’t stir what we got.
Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” which means----which means our God does, in fact, provide us with daily bread. Which means God is like the following grandmother.
Ed Gentry, an Adult Bible Study leader, in Plano, Texas wrote this about his grandmother in the Sunday School class newsletter:
When I was a kid, we used to go to my grandparents' dairy farm for a week each summer and each Christmas. Each morning my grandmother would wake up at 4 a.m. and head out to the pasture to round up the cows and take them to the barn to be milked.
I will never forget the day I came of age. It was announced that the following morning I would be allowed to get up and go with my grandmother as she performed her duties. By the time grandma was ready to go the next morning, so was I... decked out complete with cowboy boots, plastic chaps, genuine leather holster, metal cap gun (spit polished and with a fresh roll of caps all loaded up), bandanna, cowboy hat, and if memory serves, she found me digging around, looking for a piece of rope to be used to wrangle the particularly reluctant "doggies."
You can imagine my surprise when, as we started to walk to the barn, she began to softly call out the cows' names into the darkness. Elsie. Melba. Susie. Martha. Mary Jane. Lillie Ann. Margaret.
By the time we got to the barn, the first few cows were lining up to come in and get milked.
Do you hear God calling your name softly to come in and get some daily bread. [Call out names of church members.]
I know. I know. We aren’t sure about getting fed because to get fed people have to know who we are. And if we reveal who we are, who we truly are, then instead of getting fed we fear we will get rejected.
Madeleine L’Engle tells a story about being able to overcome this type of fear. She writes: One Sunday about six years ago, I was visiting an Episcopal church in New York. A man stood up. “I hope this is appropriate to ask. I was an abused child. I’m terrified of being an abusive father. I need help and prayer.”
Le’engle observes: “When I heard that man share I knew then it was a church I could stay in. Because people are willing to be vulnerable, this church is very different. Sometimes it gets messy, but that’s okay. People are not afraid to ask questions. We’re able to admit we’re all broken, we’ve all made terrible mistakes, we’re all in need, and we all want things we don’t have. [We all want to be fed.]”
Le’engle continues:
“We meet in an upper room. Our church building was sold, and we gave all the beautiful things to the Metropolitan Museum. There’s not a mink coat in the place, and there’s not anyone else my age there either. They’re all very young, very alive. The 5 o’clock eucharist is largely street people — on drugs, HIV-positive, or with AIDS. One member told me it was the only place where he was called by name. It’s a church in which a mother whose 27-year-old son has died is free to say, “People think I’m terrible because I can’t pray.” And I can reassure her, “You don’t have to pray. We’re praying for you. That’s what the body of Christ is about.” —Madeleine L’Engle, “An interview with Madeleine L’Engle,” The Other Side,
March-April 1998.
When’s the last time you were fed by the prayers of a Christian faith community? Have you been starving for so long because you haven’t been to church because you couldn’t find a church that would accept you and love you and feed you? Do you need spiritual nourishment on a daily basis? Do you need a church in which you can be real and honest and broken?
Daily bread. Give us this day----our daily bread. Daily bread because most of us have stuff, most of us have yuk, most of us have migrane inducing events on a daily basis. It’s daily bread because there are some things in life that never go away and some pains that linger, that hang around like hot humid weather and they sap the very life out of us.
Anne Lamott, one of the few Christians I can stomach, actually I could hang out with her because she is so real----Anne Lamott in her book Traveling Mercies tells about how she and others tried to provide daily bread for some of their hurting friends.
Lamott writes: “On an otherwise ordinary night at the end of September, some friends came over to watch the lunar eclipse, friends whose two-year-old daughter Olivia had been diagnosed nine months earlier with cystic fibrosis. Twice a day, every day, Olivia’s parents must pound her between the shoulder blades for forty-five minutes to dislodge the mucus from her lungs.
Recently I was out of town and I almost called Olivia. When I’m gone I’m always worried there will be bad news. I didn’t call, but I did keep Olivia in my prayers. I said to God, “Look, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but my patience is beginning to wear a little thin. . .
Sure enough when I got home I discovered Olivia’s mother had left a message on our answering machine indicating Olivia had been sick. I kept wondering, how could you possibly find the wall with the donkey on it when your child is catastrophically sick? I looked up at God, and thinking about Olivia, I said, ‘What on earth are you thinking?’”
At first, after the diagnosis, we didn’t know what to do; we were immobilized by shock and sadness. But then I had a vision of a gigantic canvas on which had been painted an exquisitely beautiful picture. We all wanted to take up a corner and lift it together so that Olivia’s parents didn’t have to carry the whole thing themselves. But I saw that they did in fact have to carry almost the whole heartbreaking picture alone. -----Then the image changed into a barn, and I saw that the people who loved them could build a marvelous barn of sorts around the family.
So we did. We raised a lot of money; catastrophes can be expensive. We showed up. Sometimes we cleaned, we listened, some of us too care of the children, we walked their dog, and we cried and then made them laugh; we gave them a lot of privacy, then we showed p and listened and let them cry and cry and cry, and then took them for hikes.
Sometimes we had let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughter’s diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do---to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort. Then we shopped for groceries. One friend gave them weekly massages. And that is how we built the barn.
Give us this day our daily barns. Give us this day------our daily bread.
Are you asking for daily bread?
Do you need some people to build a barn for you?
I invite you to come to the table. Come to the table but not alone. There’s no reason for you to be alone. I invite you to come to the table with your group, with your friends who are praying for you even now.
Print in pdf