Our Daily Bread

“Stop! There’s a good pair of shoes! Slow down, you just passed a hammer! Look at that jacket in the ditch!” As the car was speeding down the highway at 70 miles an hour, these were the exclamations of a hitchhiker to the driver who had just picked him up. After several hours of similar comments, the driver reached two conclusions:

I was watching two sisters prepare Thanksgiving dinner. They had made their special stuffing, spooned it into the turkey, and were preparing to pop it into the oven. They got out the aluminum foil and were ready to cover the meat to help hold in the juices.

While in the military I learned to hate waiting. We were commanded to hurry out of the barracks and line up. There we would stand and wait, wait, wait for our next orders. When getting vaccinations, we would stand in line and just wait.

I was concerned about my neighbor’s spiritual health because he had been in such poor physical health. So one day I asked him, “Are you ready to meet God? If something were to happen to you, are you ready?”

The name of David F. Kies is listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. A small diamond is etched beside it to indicate that he died in battle. But it is a mistake, for Kies is very much alive. He’s living in Wisconsin with his wife and five children.

In the late 1940s, a young mother was stricken with polio and became an invalid. She astounded people by the way she accepted her affliction and ran her household from her bed. Her brother-in-law said to me, “I have heard a lot of talk about ‘supernatural grace,’ but I never knew what it was until I saw it shining through her.”

In October 1991, a firestorm destroyed 2,500 homes in the vicinity of Oakland, California. When the devastated owners returned and sifted through the black debris, they found that all their possessions had been reduced to soot. But one man and his daughter discovered a tiny porcelain rabbit. They marveled that so fragile an object had survived intact. Other victims of that catastrophe also found pottery and porcelain items that had somehow defied the all-consuming firestorm.

In November 2001, many people around the world rejoiced when eight prisoners were released after 3 tension-filled months of being detained in Afghanistan. They had been charged with “preaching Christianity,” which at the time was a crime punishable by death.

Astronaut Jack Lousma described how earth looks from space. He wrote: “With the naked eye we could see freeways, airports, and cities . . . , white clouds and the snow on the mountains. We could see the green-and-brown patchwork of the farmers’ fields and the beautifully painted deserts. . . . When we were over Chicago, we could see most of Hudson Bay . . . , Washington, DC, and Baltimore. We could see two-thirds of the way down the Mississippi River and out to Denver.”

I’ll always remember the day when as a child I found two coins on the school playground. I brought them home, thinking they wouldn’t be missed. But Mother made me take them to my teacher. “They belong to someone else,” Mother told me. Since then, God has often reminded me of this early lesson in honesty.