As fine as frost on the ground… it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. (Exodus 16:2-15)
One difficulty for me – intellectually – is that God answers the people’s complaining. In some stories God answer their confidence, in others God punishes lack of faith, and in still others God surprises us before the question of faith is even raised. Here, the text says, God tests the people – except there is no test: the people complain and God provides.
There is also the likelihood that the morning-dew-bread the Hebrews find on the ground doesn’t taste very good. My understanding is that this is a natural phenomenon that still occurs to this day, but that the manna is a rather bland sort of emergency sustenance (notwithstanding the later description of it tasting like honey wafers [v31]).
I want to complain and have God meet my needs. I want God to deliver me from my anxieties, my frustrations, my uncertainties. I want God to provide for me a simple living. Like the Hebrews, I wanted my freedom more than anything else, but now that I am in the wilderness of adulthood, fending more for myself and finding the struggle terrifying and depressingly difficult, with starvation and homelessness hounding me on and threatening me at every failure. And I wonder if I also am finding the solutions open to me on the ground too bland to satisfy me.
I don’t think God is testing me – surely I would fail any such test, and I don’t think God is so petty as to schoolmarm me so. But I wonder if “test” is really describing our (human) experience, rather than God’s intention. Here we are, holding fast to a set of convictions, a distinct worldview (of hope and generosity, in constant tension with the world’s view of despair and struggle), and along come circumstances that seem to reinforce our basest instincts, our jealousy and rage, our protectiveness and resentfulness. It seems like an opportunity to choose between value-systems. It feels like a test – a test of our resolve, of our creativity, of our commitment to confidence in a worldview or story or hope that just doesn’t make sense sometimes. It feels like we can fail – that once choice is what we are supposed to select, and the other plainly wrong (but tempting for all that). Calling it a “test” is a descriptive term, not a prescriptive term – it describes the situation from our perspective, through the lens of our experience, not from the perspective of God. (Scripture is, we must remember, so often our human description and approximation of our experience of encountering God.)
But realizing that it isn’t a test engineered by God, but just feels like a test to me, doesn’t change how it feels to me. I feel tested – and failing. I want God to hear my complaining and meet my needs no matter what. I just want to cry out and be met by God, soothed by God, handed new life and strength, a change of certain situations, have my needs met (if humbly) without my having to worry about it. That’s what I want.
But can I not worry? Can I not be anxious? Will I not despair? Surely I will fail. But I suppose that’s one point of the story: God will meet us anyway. God will cover us with dew and chill, and when that has lifted (before the heat of the day melts it away) there will be a thin, flaky, surprising hope on the ground, sustenance for a little while longer.

Getting Back In the Saddle

Acts 2:42-47

This should be an easy one for me to meditate on – so harmonious with my own thinking, so bold in its vision, so clear in its conviction, so powerful in its example. Perhaps I’m out of practice, but although many sermons come to mind, new insight is not burning within me. Perhaps I should take the scripture’s advice: devote myself to the apostles’ teaching, break bread with others, pray often, share my material wealth with the poor.

I am struck by the words devoted to the apostles’ teaching, and the difference between my job and my discipleship comes into focus. As a minister, my job is the devotion of the saints to the gospel of Jesus Christ. But my discipleship, my personal devotion, does not come with the title or in the 60-hour work week. Over the past two months or so – my first on the job, filled with new responsibilities and stress – I have focused on the job, and even lost site of the big picture there. I have been sucked into the details, the administrativa, the responsibility, the pressure. I need to remember to let myself breathe, and breathe intentionally with the Spirit sometimes, in order to be a good minister and a good disciple.

I am grateful for the patience of those around me: my wife, my co-workers and neighbor on whom I depend so, the congregants and church members who want to meet and welcome me. Surely, I am not done with the transition process – to European thinker, to Dutch resident, to regional president of the church, to supervisor, and so on. But I am hearing the need within me for more devotion. Prayer, breaking bread, sharing possessions (and time?), and returning to the scriptures as a tool for devotion. (I get too academic about scripture, sometimes.)

All the spiritual gifts and community proceeds from devotion to the apostles’ teaching. That’s where it all starts. At least for me. At least for this morning. I’m sure I’ll have more to learn tomorrow.

More Personal

Jeremiah 1:4-10

I don't want to be self-centered or egotistical, but at the same time, isn't it an honest encounter with scripture to sometimes have the feeling it is speaking directly to you?

Recently, I accepted an administrative role in my church of increased responsibility - the most responsibility I've had in my life to this point. And I can't shake the sense that I am in so many ways not up to the task. (I'm not a complete boob, of course, and there are things I bring to the role that are advantageous. But still....) I am so young, so inexperienced.

I want to say with Jeremiah: "I am just a boy!" I don't know how to speak, what to say, how to administer such a large jurisdiction, how to guide ministers many years my senior, how to grow your church.

But God doesn't let me get away with that kind of thinking. God says to me: you will go to whom I send you. You will speak what I command you. Don't be afraid. I have appointed you (and this is the first scary part) over nations and over kingdoms, (this is the second scary part) to pluck up and pull down... to build and plant.

The job is mine, but the work is God's. In some ways, I am freed even as I assume greater responsibility. I feel the weight, but God doesn't let me get a big head about myself and let me go on thinking that I'm bearing the weight, or that the weight is my burden. I am engaged in a work that is greater than myself, and if I'm honest about that, then there's less reason to be scared.

Yes, I am just a human being. But I am not less than that. My inability or youth or inexperience is no excuse - God's job qualifications more than make up for my inadequacies, and there is work to be done.

Work to be done.