Manna

It occurs to me that there is a lesson to be learned from Manna.

I think most of us are familiar with the story: When the Children of Israel came up out of Egypt through the wilderness, God gave them Manna to eat. God told them that, Sunday through Thursday, they should only gather enough for one day, but on Friday, they should gather enough for two days. The Bible tells us that some of the Israelites tried to gather more than one days worth on the days that they were only supposed to gather one days worth, and some people went out on the Sabbath day and tried to gather manna (they may have even been the same people). The Bible tells us that the people that listened to God had no lack, nor any extra. Sort of like Goldilocks with Baby Bear’s stuff: It was just right.

I don’t claim to know if the people that tried to bring in extra were greedy, or lazy, or just
had a hard time figuring out what they really needed. I can remember as a kid, my mother watching me serve my own plate and warning me that my eyes were bigger than my stomach. She was usually right; it took me a while to be able to gauge how much food would actually fill my belly, especially when I felt unusually hungry. I know some people will try to pack more food into their stomachs than what they can reasonably hold. I also know that some people are so afraid of running out of something that they will hoard it. Some people are also just plain lazy. It’s easy for me to imagine some poor Israelite thinking that life is just so rough: “Here I am, stuck in this desert with millions of other people, not a stick of antiperspirant amongst all of us, and now I have to go out and gather this manna stuff six days a week. You know, if I just gather a little extra, then I may be able to work it so that I only have to go out three days a week…” In any case, it didn’t work. Anybody that tried to put some of it away overnight found that had gone bad in the morning, except on Friday night. I would imagine that was probably confusing to a lot of people. “If I save some on Monday night, then on Tuesday morning it has gone bad, but if I save some on Friday night, then on Saturday morning it’s just as fresh as it was Friday morning.” Of course, the proper way to look at it is, “Gee, as long as I do what God said to do, then He takes care of me.”

I guess that’s why Jesus told us to take no thought for tomorrow. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think He meant that we don’t have to do laundry (although my sister has an interesting story about some laundry and a jigsaw puzzle), but more the fact that things will happen tomorrow that we have no control over. If we spend today worrying about the things that might happen tomorrow, we won’t get done today the things that we need to get done today, which will really only make tomorrow that much worse. Solomon once wrote about a man that wouldn’t leave his house, using the excuse that there might be a lion in the street. Most of the things that we worry about are at least more realistic than that, but we need to trust God to get us through those things, rather than work ourselves up over things that we can’t change anyway. Yes, you should pray about those things, and if you don’t feel that the issue is resolved, then pray some more, but let God handle those things. Don’t be the child that asks its father to fix something that it has broken, and then refuse to let go so that the Father can fix it.