daily bread

I am a planner.  And this fact also tends to make me a worrier.

My prayer life has always been a bit funny.  I think it's because I put a lot of pressure or expectation on myself.  Expectations about what my prayer life should look like, when I should be praying, how much I should be praying, who I should be praying for...blah, blah, blah.  Trying to figure out what would be "normal" for someone trying to live their life following Christ.  But I'm starting to learn how to let go of a lot of that.  It's amazing how refreshing freedom is.

Luckily, both my mother and the man I married are amazing prayers (not that some of us are better than others, but it just comes so naturally to them...you know what I mean).  And just from living life with them, I've learned a lot about the subject.  Recently I purchased Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours Seasonal series and I am really liking it.  It's given a little more rhythm and structure to my prayer life.  I like structure - most of the time.

In daily reading through the prayers, you end up saying the Lord's Prayer - a lot.  And lately, the line that goes "and give us this day our daily bread" has been consuming me.  Moving to Chicago, I've had a lot of stress about how we were/are going to make this work.  Lots to pieces to the puzzle.  And still pieces to fall into place.

I think I've come to realize, that I really just wish that the Lord's prayer would go a little something more like this...."give us this day our daily bread, and give me the bread we will need tomorrow, and the bread we will need next week, and the bread we will need next year and for the entire time we spend here in seminary".  But, guess what?  It doesn't read like that.

Especially in a culture where we are told to save for retirement the moment we graduate college, buy in bulk, hear nothing but stories about financial ruin in the news and are supposed to be saving for our children's college funds before they are even born, I find it is often difficult to remember how much my daily needs - and often wants - are being met.  It's so much easier to focus on the amount of money that we are not making, instead of how much we are provided for.  And it's not even that any of those future planning type things are bad, but I think they give me such a false sense of security.  Or maybe distort what a true security is really all about.

I have my daily bread.  And we have bread for tomorrow.  We have a daily apartment that I love.  We have daily friends to share our life with.  I have daily time to play with my kids.  We have daily internet and cell phones.  I have daily time with my husband in the midst of figuring out what life looks like here.  And the list goes on and on.

And I know that this is nothing new under the sun.  And I know that I will continue to struggle with worries and doubts.  But it's just good to get it all under a little bit of perspective sometimes. And I don't want to miss out on God showing me truly what my needs are today and the ways that He is meeting me there because I'm too focused on what I think I'm going to need tomorrow.