Out Our Way: Give us our daily bread

Out our way, the wonders of the natural world are all around you if we bother to notice them. Working pairs up on the Tiger Ridge with Charlie, Doc and I noted a great many more critters than the cows we were herding. We saw blue birds, meadowlarks, hawks, some deer, occasional fox and coyotes, and of course all sorts of flies, butterflies, grasshoppers and such. And all were doing just fine.

Jesus made a point about taking a clue from the natural world and realizing that if all these creatures are cared for, how much more so are we? That is a lesson many of us tend to forget.

The word “gospel” is actually an old English word, “gud spel,” which literally peans “good news.” Indeed, that is the literal translation of the Greek word “euaggelion” found in the Bible. And what is the “good news?” It is the message of Jesus, spoken and demonstrated through His life, death and resurrection, that God loves us. It is the message in the Lord’s prayer in which we, with confidence ask God for our “daily bread” … that is the necessities of life.

Yet the sceptic will note and say that despite our prayers, famine still exists in the world. And that person is correct, but dig a little deeper as to the cause of those incidents of famine, consider which are caused by natural causes and which are caused by human endeavors — and in either case, what God has done about it.

Consider the some 20 million people in the Ukraine whose crops were taken and the people starved to death by Stalin’s Soviet government. Or the millions of predominantly Christian Ethiopians who, in the midst of a natural drought, were denied food and resources by the Communist Ethiopian government who saw them as a threat. The drought was natural — but the famine was man made.

We saw the same thing in Cambodia when Pol Pot used starvation as a means to destroy those he considered potential threats to his regime — and again Mao used starvation against his own people to maintain control and power.  

These fairly modern examples were not the first nor, sadly, will they be the last human created or encouraged famines on this earth. And why? Because in every case we find the chief villains to be human beings insisting on replacing God with self.

But let us also look at the response we see of God’s children to these atrocities. The Red Cross, World Vision, Unicef and countless other organizations band together to do something about it. Even nonbelievers are still children of God and most have inside that same sense of family with the rest of the human race. Did anyone care that that photo of that child in Ethiopia with the swollen belly and a skull for a face was black and foreign? Did anyone care that those kids dying in the death camps of Cambodia were Asian? Does it matter to us that the starving child in our own country is black, brown yellow, red or white? No! It only matters that there is someone going hungry and most of us can and do manage to do something about it.  

      We give to the Red Cross, to the church and secular relief funds — we make a point to help out with the soup kitchen, food bank and Salvation Army. Famine comes into the world by natural and human means. And when Christ prays for God to provide “our daily bread,” God does so, in many cases, through you and me. How fine is that?

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Brother John Bruington and Doc hope to continue to share insights and theology under saddle. Hope you continue to enjoy them.