Day 9: My daily bread

 Give us this day, our daily bread. 

There was a time in my life when I prayed this daily and meant it.  I live by faith,  trusting God would care for me. 

I had dedicated my life to working in Haiti.  I was in college.  I scrapped by to pay for books and tuition,  I lived with my folks when I was home and almost everything else I earned went to building a school there.  I lived and worked there on and off for over three years sometimes arranging with school to take courses remotely.  I gathered donations from my church and from Haitian communities in Montreal,  New York and Miami.  I stayed with strangers. I broke bread with them and laughed over stories.  I learned Creole. It was for me a season of the Holy Spirit. In those days, I could have walked on water.  If you ever need a good story,  ask me about that period in my life. It was full of them.  

These days,  I don't live quite in the knife edge of faith anymore. There is a blessing of abundance of financial resource that allows me not to worry about my daily bread in the same way, plus we have chickens,  and so I look for opportunities to cultivate that same practice of trust in God. 

This blog is one such place.  

Writing about God for 46 days straight is a tall order. To do it year after year deepens the practice of trust. 

I think about it all day and when nothing comes to mind,  I just pray 

Give me this day my daily bread

And I set it aside.  Still aware,  still probing.  Like Abraham climbing the mountain,  I have my eyes open all around... what Lord, could I possibly write about. 

The sun is setting.  I still have nothing.  

There is great vulnerability in this practice. 

If I was a proud or unkind that day,  the empty page will convict me - it will be a post about confession.  And I will hang it on Facebook for all to see. If I was too busy to notice God,  it will be shallow. 

But mostly I try.  I seek.  I use this practice as an active exercise in trusting God. And in the last moment,  as the words spill onto the screen,  God opens my heart to the daily bread.  The bit of wisdom to feed me that day. 

As I write this,  I chew on how deeply this practice of trusting daily on God.  If someone randomly asked me,  when in your life did or do you feel closest to God,  without a beat I would answer - while I was working in Haiti and during Lent. And as I reflect on that fact,  the core of that closeness comes from a commitment to fully trust God for my daily bread - figuratively or literally.  

I'll be to chew on this and perhaps look into ways that I can authentically create space to deeply trust God for some sort of daily bread all the time. It is not at all an easy practice,  but it has been powerful in my spiritual walk so far and perhaps worth pondering a bit more.