Snowbound, yet nourished by Love
At the height of one of the snowstorms that battered New England this winter, a package appeared on our front doorstep. It was soon buried in snow, and I was cautious about going out to retrieve it since opening the door was not an easy feat! What could it be?
While confined indoors, my wife and I had been handling wardrobe clutter and sorting piles of yellowing documents. Among the papers we were clearing, my wife found a church bulletin from a few years back. It showed the words of the solo to be sung that day, pointing out that the soloist had written both words and music. These lines immediately grabbed our attention:
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The Lord will preserve my coming in,
Showing me right where to begin.
The Lord will take care of everything.
The undisguised echo of Psalms 121:8 (which speaks of God’s protection wherever we go) inspired us. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of this verse in The Message puts it this way:
God guards you from every evil,
he guards your very life.
He guards you when you leave and when you return,
he guards you now, he guards you always.
Throughout that storm, my wife and I had been doing fine, although we felt it would have been nice to have something other than ready-made foods for dinner. Eventually, we were able to force the front door open and retrieve that package. We wiped off the snow and read the kindest message inside from a friend who lives in a warm and sunny climate: When dear friends are buried in great drifts of snow / It is key they’re provided with plenty of dough!
Three crusty brown loaves of bread smiled up at us from within their icy container, and we whooped with joy! The Lord’s Prayer came alive for us as we said aloud: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). Mary Baker Eddy says this in her spiritual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:
Give us this day our daily bread;
Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections (p. 16).
It wasn’t that our food supplies were seriously dwindling—although it was almost impossible to get out to the shops—but this bread was a kind of evidence of God’s constant love. We were filled with the ageless reassurance within the Lord’s Prayer that God supplies all our needs and lovingly shepherds us through all of life’s challenges, delivering us from sin, disease, and death.
We also paused for a few moments to recognize that “daily bread” is a metaphor for the spiritual food we need, and that when we acknowledge God as our Father, we can confidently and humbly ask for grace to bear our burdens with patience and with expectancy of healing. When we “hallow” the name of our heavenly Father and build unshakable trust in His authority, and in His unchanging love for us, then we can honestly rejoice, “Thy will be done.”
We were filled with the ageless reassurance within the Lord’s Prayer that God supplies all our needs.
And you may have guessed it … The person who had sent the bread was the writer and singer of that solo about God’s provision for all our needs! Her gift had arrived on the very same day we had enjoyed rediscovering the words of her solo about God as our Preserver.
Ultimately, it wasn’t those loaves (dropped like manna on a frozen city doorstep) that brought the deepest joy. It was the opportunity to go beyond praise for a thoughtful friend to gratitude for the heartfelt, spiritual blessing of “grace for to-day.”
Our Father-Mother God does indeed “feed the famished affections”—everywhere, at all times.