Living on Manna
And how that feels.
The idea of the Israelites in the desert following a cloud or a flame, each day kneeling to grab their sustenance from the ground seemed great to me when I first came to seek the Lord. What could be more identifying than living so gathered and so reliant upon the very presence of God? I wanted to be a holy one, and I think somewhere along the line I prayed as much. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember for a number of years begging God to let me bring him glory. And I still pray that prayer, still desire to be a glory-carrier, but I had no idea what it would mean.
I’m going to be real with you—maybe too real, but what the heck, you know?
The way I’m living right now doesn’t actually work on paper. By that, I mean that my job doesn’t pay me enough to actually live. On my salary alone, we cannot cover our basic living expenses. But that’s where I start to experience the manna life, because, through a variety of circumstances that are beyond my control, we have just enough extra income to make our situation tenable, at least for now. At least through the end of the year as long as inflation keeps slowing and my van stays faithful into its 200,000 mile era. We’re not getting ahead, by any means, and we have no meaningful way to contribute to a retirement fund, but the Lord is actively answering my continual returning to the Our Father by providing our daily bread. We have some nice things in a nice suburb on a nice culdesac. Nothing fancy, save my wife’s heirloom wedding/engagement ring, but good things. I cannot complain.
What I don’t have that I desperately want is healthy margin. My expenditures are almost completely limited to our family needs—not wholly, but certainly on the whole. Unlike many of my neighbors, I don’t have the spare cash to finally lay my old Town & Country to rest and replace it with a used Facebook Marketplace something-or-other with less than 150,000 miles on it. My grass is, uh… “unkempt” because it turns out that good grass is more money than hard work, mostly because good grass just doesn’t want to grow in the silty soil around here. So, it just gets mowed and watered and then trampled by children because, realistically, it needs about $1000 a year in maintenance, and I’d rather spend part of that on oil changes and then leave the rest in our savings account for whatever might break. We’re seriously considering throwing wildflower seed on the bare patches and letting our lawn bloom into something helpful to what’s left of the honey bees in the world.
I hope that doesn’t sound like complaining; I’m just trying to give you a picture of what it’s like for me and, I’d dare say, a lot of other people who have chosen to trust the Lord. We moved our family to Kansas because he called us here, and we’re still here because he’s sustaining us here, giving us each day our daily bread. I have no other explanation for how this is working. By Dave Ramsey’s math, I need to quit this job and find something that makes sense for my family’s needs, wants, and future, but Dave isn’t right about everything.
This is the manna life, and it is good—our home pointed to and opened towards the place of Meeting, and we wait on the Presence of God to lead us.
I’ll be even more honest with you—I don’t enjoy the manna life all the time. Maybe I should; I don’t know. I’d liken it to standing on that glass walk-out on top of the Willis Tower in Chicago. You can look down through the clear glass into the air below and know that you’re being held up, but it doesn’t feel good, at least not to someone like me. At the very least, it doesn’t feel normal. I trust that I will not fall despite what my eyes are seeing and my body is feeling, but my body doesn’t feel like it.
For what it’s worth, faith is not the absence of fear. It’s not that Peter wasn’t afraid at all when he stepped out of that boat onto the waves; rather, it’s that he was looking to Jesus and trusting Jesus. It’s when his fear overcame the looking that he started to sink.
I pray that we keep looking, somehow content in the waiting for manna.