Our daily bread is our meaning. It’s heaven’s whispers to keep going because Something bigger and better sustains us when we are starved for life to mean more and be more.
Originally published on Peyton Garland's Substack, Uncured+Okay.
I’ve had the great honor of loving wonderful people. Yet, the more I love, the more I fear—a most vicious dichotomy for a woman with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder who needs, needs, hope to survive.
Perhaps our imperfect, flawed shells simply can’t hold all that love is if we don’t sprinkle our faults and fears and flaky ways of existing all over its righteous intentions. Regardless, fear isn’t something I want; her excuses were never welcome. She’s just some cruel guest who showed up at my doorstep, and before I could tell her she wasn’t allowed in my home, she tethered me to her with a chain I can’t cut.
Motherhood's Weight
Motherhood only made the chain heavier. I feel much like Jacob Marley from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, dragging locks without keys—or worse, locks with keys just out of reach—and all their agonizing weights from room to room, season to season.
Oddly enough, fear and all her cruel baggage have brought me to a dependence on God that, for so long, I didn’t want. It wasn’t because I didn’t love God. It wasn’t because I didn’t like Him or believe in His deity. It’s because I loved myself more. I liked how I could puff myself up with achievements and all the invisible badges they give young women who sit still and follow the church’s dress code. If I could be my own deity, I could justify every decision I made, even the self-pleasing ones I decorated with Bible verses so they looked just “Jesus” enough to pass as righteous.
Nonetheless, this new role as a mother is my daily crow, a humble-pie diet forcing me to reconcile how changing diapers is holy work, saying “never” will come back to bite you, and realizing I know nothing, whether it concerns discipline, discipleship, nutrition, or sickness. Even the things I do know, my mind now forgets. I have no choice but to confess my brain divorced my body and now lives with someone else, somewhere else. Such are the vague details I’m privy to.
You see, I left my phone on top of the car several months ago, and it’s now somewhere in pieces on Andrew Johnson Highway. Three Sundays ago, I showed up to church at 10:30 because that’s when church starts… except it starts at 10. (I’ve been attending this church for 2.5 years.) And the day after that, I forgot about my key and locked my child in the car.
By the grace of God, JH was inside the car with the AC running, his favorite songs playing (on my phone also locked in the car), with a giant stick (his favorite toy). Meanwhile, I was calling my mom through my laptop for her to call 911, quite convinced I was about to enter cardiac arrest. The sheriff’s department arrived within minutes and unlocked my car.
I had to remind my heart several times that it was okay to beat. My lungs needed voluntary encouragement to inhale again. Eventually, circadian rhythm returned, and I was calm.
Once we returned home from our wild morning, I whispered to God, “Thank you for my daily bread,” and a thought I’ve been mulling over was confirmed deep in my adrenaline-shot bones: our daily bread isn’t only the physical food that feeds us. It’s the grace that sustains us, all its bits and pieces that fill the ordinary spaces of our days that, let’s be honest, apart from God, would be meaningless.
Our daily bread is our meaning. It’s heaven’s whispers to keep going because Something bigger and better sustains us when we are starved for life to mean more and be more.
Heaven's Breadcrumbs
That Monday’s daily bread wasn’t a beautiful loaf I could enjoy in peace and quiet. It wasn’t baked in glory or glazed with pleasure. It was the golden crumbs from above that filled me with the truth that fear will one day starve. She won’t have the strength to keep yanking me around. Her chain will be broken by Perfect Love, the God-man who casts out all fear (1 John 4:18).
But until all things are healed, my soul will hum with the words of the woman from Matthew 15:27-28, as she begged Jesus to heal her daughter: “‘For indeed the little-dogs eat from the crumbs falling from the table of their masters!’ Then, having responded, Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, your faith is great. Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed from that hour.”
I encourage you to recognize that your daily bread is much more than the food on your table. Your daily bread is the grace and mercy that sustain you as you discover your weaknesses and surrender pride and perfection to the God who does all things with a flawless heart.
This new understanding has shifted my view of God. It’s deepened my resolve to worship Him, and as I look back on my thirty-one years of living, I can’t help but recognize this new piece of Him I’ve discovered.
In my teens, I loved God out of fear. I was scared not to love Him.
In my 20s, I liked God out of adoration. After lots of wrestling with my unhealthy church background and truly understanding God’s forgiveness, I began to heal.
In my 30s, I’m learning to respect God out of a settling humility. I’ve fought pride my entire life, but the nitty-gritty of mothering a child has quickly taught me that I can’t do it all. I can’t even do half of what I should. Though this doesn’t always settle well in my mind, it’s settled in my soul that I’m safe—that fear has no place—when I thank God for my daily bread in all life’s unpleasant, heavy moments.
Your Daily Bread
I encourage you to do the same, to simply whisper, “Thank you for my daily bread,” whenever you see God’s goodness overcome life’s worst, whenever it promises your best a rest from life’s striving syllabus.
And on the hardest days, I challenge you to say the whole prayer, The Lord’s Prayer, aloud. There’s something incredibly powerful about walking yourself through each line, letting your soul connect with mind as you give these words meaning:
After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/KucherAV
