It's Daily Bread, Not Forever Bread

I have previously shared that when Elliott was born nearly 19 years ago, God removed my appetite for alcohol. Since the age of 12 maybe nothing had ever made me feel better than alcohol, but there I was, thirty years later, staring into the eyes of a baby who made me in an instant forget that alcohol ever existed.

But it turns out God's miracles rarely work that way. God rarely lets us just suddenly escape what he wants us to forever depend on him for the escaping.

There's a famous old testament bible story. After spending years enslaved by the Egyptians, God suddenly frees the Israelites. The Israelites experienced the joy of sudden freedom and thought they were only a short several weeks trip through the desert away from being back home.

Only, that short trip turned into 40 years...

The Israelites got so wrapped up in their own desires and frustrations and personal struggles to depend on the God who had just led them out to lead them home. They wanted God to fix once and for all what God wanted them to depend on him daily to fix.

In the Lords prayer, it's sometimes easy to forget these words, the words Jesus used to teach his disciples how to pray:

"Give us day by day our DAILY bread."

Do you notice Jesus didn't instruct his disciples to ask God to give them what they needed forever? Jesus taught them to ask God for what they needed each day, in turn teaching them to trust God daily to heal what will never be forever fixed.

Why do I share this?

In the latter years of my marriage and certainly since my divorce, I have remembered quite strongly at times that nothing ever made me feel better than alcohol. And I am not ashamed to admit there have been times I have gone back to that place I was once quite sure that God had removed from every map in my life forever.

But in the temptation of going back - in the actual GOING back at times - I have learned and I have been reminded, the Israelites drew closer to God in those 40 years in the desert than they were ever going to if it had been the quick trip home they imagined.

Quick trips sometimes invite us to write off miracles in our lives as magic and not see the miraculous in God. Quick trips invite us to believe God is one and done when God is really one day and one day and one day.....

Every day, God.

Daily bread not forever bread.

God never completely eliminates our appetite and temptation for things that will disrupt and even destroy us. But God will replace our appetite for such things with an appetite for him.

He will, that is, if we will show up daily and ask for our DAILY bread.

We may never fully get out of it, but with God we can every day keep it out of us.

If you are struggling with something you long ago thought you lost an appetite for, don't spend your day beating yourself up. Spend your day asking for your daily bread.