Our Daily Bread

Two writers whose books were penned in an era far different from our late 20th-century techno-society have made comebacks recently. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility became popular again when film producers put their stories on the screen.

Have you ever felt ashamed? Perhaps you feel shame now. You have lied or you have slandered a friend. Perhaps you have broken a vow or betrayed a trust. You have sinned and you know it. You are guilty and you feel ashamed.

Between sobs, the young woman on the telephone told me that her husband had just beaten her. I knew that the man had grown up with an abusive father, so it was not surprising that he followed that bad example.

“Sometimes love sure hurts!” The mother and father were expressing the difficulties and heartaches of guiding their children through their teen years. “Maybe if we didn’t love them quite so much it wouldn’t be so hard,” the husband added.

Several years have passed since the publication of my book Finding the God-Dependent Life. It’s the story of how I learned to depend on God through the gradual breakdown of my self-sufficiency. My inadequacies forced me to depend on Him. In time, it became clear that the same principles that helped me in a crisis could surely help me all the time. So God-dependence became my chosen way of life. The result was greater wholeness and fruitfulness.

After a long winter, a local news paper celebrated the first summerlike day with a photo of a young man stretched out under the warm sun. He was wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap, blue jeans, and a sleeveless shirt. One hand rested on his forehead and the other balanced a radio on his stomach. This was obviously his kind of day.

If you ask for Kleenex, you won’t necessarily get that brand of tissue. The same is true if you request Scotch tape, a Coke, or a Xerox copy. Then there’s the Jeep, the Band-Aid, and the Thermos. Specific trademark names often take on broader meaning than the original product.

Bill Irwin, a friend of mine who is blind, has a talking computer he uses to study the Bible. He’s had a few chuckles over some of the pronunciations. “For a long time,” Bill says, “the computer pronounced Holy Bible as ‘holly bibble’ until I figured out how to modify it.”

There’s a gulf of difference—far wider than the Grand Canyon—between living for something and merely living. But what is a worthy purpose for our existence?

After the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, Billy Graham addressed the grieving citizens. Mrs. Frank Keating, the governor’s wife, later recalled, “As he sat on the platform before his message, I saw a man with physical weakness. But when he stood up to speak, there was energy and vitality. And when he sat down, he was again a man of weakness.”