Manna and God, part 1

The following two posts are a devotion I wrote for our Foundation's Academy of Faith and Generosity  

The Walk to Emmaus is a leadership development program that begins with a three-day retreat experience. For me, that three-day retreat was in the fall of 2006.  After that, I continued to participate in the community – helping with other walks, and eventually becoming part of the leadership team.   During one of the meetings of that team, we spent a lot of time talking about mattresses.  The walks our community sponsors are held in a United Methodist Church, and because the three-day walks involve three nights at the Church, the community owns mattresses. They are stored in the church’s attic, and when a walk is about to happen, we have a mattress party, pull the mattresses out of the attic, and prepare the sleeping rooms for the walk.

We were spending a lot of time during this one particular meeting talking about mattresses, because an un-related ministry had asked our community if they could borrow our mattresses for one of their events.  I can’t tell you how long we debated this question.  I can’t tell you because I’ve blocked it out.  It seemed to go on forever.  Until one of the pastors who was providing spiritual direction for the community said, “Jesus would want you to let them use the mattresses.”

Well, if you want to bring Jesus into the discussion.

It was an uncomfortable truth that we didn’t want to hear. We hadn’t even considered the radical question of being a faithful disciples to Christ in our discussion.  Maybe we were enjoying the power of owning the mattresses too much.  Maybe we were too lazy to think about pulling all of those mattresses out of the attic in service to someone else.  Maybe we just didn’t get it at all.

Have you ever been to a church meeting like that? Where you go on and on about a question or a problem, but no one ever even imagines that God might be in the room?

Yesterday, Jeff talked about the Feeding of the 5000.  The disciples came to Jesus and suggested he send the people away so that they could eat. Did the disciples ever consider that God was in the room?

Our scripture this morning is from Exodus 16. Verses 1-3 say:   

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim (ee-luhm) and came to the Sin desert, which is located between Elim and Sinai (si-ni) . They set out on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had left the land of Egypt. ² The whole Israelite community complained against Moses and Aaron in the desert. ³ The Israelites said to them, “Oh, how we wish that the Lord had just put us to death while we were still in the land of Egypt. There we could sit by the pots cooking meat and eat our fill of bread. Instead, you’ve brought us out into this desert to starve this whole assembly to death.”

It doesn’t sound to me like the Israelite ever considered that God was in the room.  We talk about having eyes that see abundance instead of scarcity, but I want us to hear today that when we forget that God is with us, that when God calls us to a particular work, that God will be part of what we are doing – when we forget that, we are seeing our world with eyes of scarcity. 

Continued on Wednesday...