“Did you know that there was a time when God made bread fall from the sky?”

Her eyes went wide. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Pretty cool story, huh?”

She nodded and looked down at the open Bible on the table. She pushed it toward me and then patted it with her little hand a couple of times.

“Daddy,” she said, “you’re gonna have to tell me that one.”

One of the ways my wife and I are figuring out this homeschool thing is that three days a week I sit down for an hour or so with Ona, our kindergartener, and work through letters and basic life skills. This week we’ve been working on the letter “I” (which in Ona’s opinion, seems unfairly similar to the lowercase “L”). We’ve also been learning our basic food groups, and that’s looked like me telling her to run to the pantry or the refrigerator and then timing her to find out how quickly she can come back and place whatever food item she fetched in the right grouping marked on our paper plate. We both find it pretty fun.

The curriculum we’re using tries to incorporate memory verses and biblical themes into the work of letters and life skills. Sometimes it’s clunky, and sometimes it works. Given the food theme, this week we’ve been memorizing the fruit of the Spirit and learning about God’s provision, especially around matters of food.

On Tuesday we ate bread and talked about Jesus feeding the 5,000. Today we looked at all the food stored in our pantry and talked about the time God helped Joseph interpret Pharaoh’s dream, leading to the creation of storehouses of food that helped people survive the famine. Yesterday was about the manna God provided in the wilderness.

In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you.”


Exodus 16:2-4

This morning I woke up in the dark, and my first thoughts were anxious ones.

“Nick, you don’t have a job.”

It went on from there. “Sure, at first it was nice just to slow down, but it’s been a month now. Do you know what you’re going to do? Are you really looking hard enough? That opportunity from the other day, maybe you should just say yes. You have a family to provide for.”

Falling back asleep wasn’t going to happen, so I got up and was brushing my teeth in the dark when a moment from yesterday hit me.

“Ona, what do you think a story like this one tells us about God? When we’re in the middle of nowhere and God makes bread fall like rain, what does that say to you?”

With hardly a pause she answered, “God will take care of us.”

I finished brushing my teeth. I could just see my reflection in the mirror in the half-light filtering through the window. I quietly told myself, “God will take care of us. God is taking care of us.”

Jesus fed 5,000 people, turning hardly anything into more than enough. When there was no source of food as far as the eye could see, he made bread fall from heaven. When a time of famine was on the way, he laid out a plan to provide.

The whole time I’ve been teaching my kindergartener my Heavenly Father has been teaching me, saying:

“Start with what you have, however humble, and I can make it into more.”

“When it looks like you’ve got nothing, just watch what I can do.”

“I saw the lean times coming, and I’ve made a plan to see you through.”

Please hear me say: We are not in need. In fact, I’ve had to take a step back today to slow down and marvel at all the ways God has provided for exactly this kind of season. Through wise choices, wild generosity, and whole host of choices that seemed strange at the time and now appear clairvoyant, God has been preparing and providing for us.

I’m writing about and reflecting on all of this because I’m convicted and humbled by how quick I am to panic and pretend it’s me who does the providing. I’m humbled by how much I still need the faith of a child, one who hears stories of God’s faithfulness and simply concludes, “God will take care of us.”