Our Daily (Fill in the Blank)

Give us this day our daily bread. - Matthew 6:11 (NRSV)

 

I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer since childhood. When the pandemic started five years ago, the prayer took on a deeper meaning, especially the line about daily bread. When the world shut down, I learned time and again how many people—farmers and farmworkers, truck drivers and plant workers, the people who harvested the grain and those who stocked the grocery stores—made that daily bread possible.

 

The pandemic also reminded me of a friend’s wisdom about praying the Lord’s Prayer in a 12-step meeting. “When we ask for ‘our daily bread,’” he said, “you hear people pray for all kinds of things—daily courage, daily strength, daily guidance.” The pandemic’s long months of constant pivots shrank my usual long-range planning prayers to those deep daily prayers for whatever courage or wisdom I—or the church I serve—needed to get to the next day.

 

Sometimes the prayer for daily bread took on other tangible forms. I prayed for daily sunrises, daily walks, or a daily check-in with a colleague or friend, anything to remind me of beauty and life. As the author Barbara Kingsolver wrote of her “worst seasons,” she forced herself “to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window ... my daughter in a yellow dress ... the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with life again.”

 

“Give us this day our daily bread,” Jesus taught. Or our daily courage. Or a daily glorious thing. Whatever our prayer, may we trust the One who taught it and who hears it.

 

Prayer

Bread, hope, strength, geraniums. Thank you, God, for your daily gifts. Amen.