Bread Alone

Baking Bread Onboard Ship

If I had to choose one thing to eat, it would be freshly baked bread.  The aroma is intoxicating.  It begins to tease and tempt long before the crust hardens and turns golden brown.  It is one of those trigger smells that take you back to childhood memories of grandma's kitchen with flour covering the table like snow.  If bread was considered decadent and sinful, I would be in serious trouble.

I think it is a cruel twist of nature that bread and butter, the staples of life, contribute to weight gain.  I can deal with the evils of some foods like chocolate and cheesecake.  As much as I love them, I can understand why they need to taken in moderation.  But fresh baked bread?  Come on!  That's not right.

Given my passion for crusty, buttery goodness, you would think the last thing I would do is eliminate bread altogether from my diet, but for a long time (at least long for me) that's exactly what I did.  No bread, no pasta, no carbohydrates at all!  What was I thinking?

It worked.  I lost a lot of weight, but there was something missing in my life.

He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. - Deuteronomy 8:3

During Lent, one of the things I try to reflect on is the motivation behind my actions.  I understand the message in today's reading as one of thoughtful introspection.  What drives me?  Do I fill myself with things I enjoy, thinking only of my needs and desires?  Or do I leave room for something else in my daily intake?

What does it mean to live on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD?

This forty day journey through the desert in Lent is the perfect time to think about such things.  In our Education for Ministry class, we learn to embrace the symbolism and metaphors that we find in these stories, so that we can begin to understand that we have many dimensions to our own existence.  We are not literal beings, and as such, we don't live on food alone.  In other words, what would my life be like if each day was a repeat performance.  Arise, search for food, eat, sleep and arise again, peppered with an occasional battle against others who want food too.

That's not enough, is it?

For some, though, that may be all that is left.  I remember my grandmother, the one who taught me about the magic of making bread.  After she suffered a stroke at the age of 93, we knew we couldn't take care of her and so we put her in a nursing home where there would be someone to make sure she got what she needed.  There she would awaken, be fed, kept safe and put to bed.