#BIGRead14

I LOVE bread … especially crusty fresh granary bread… the smell of it, the texture, the taste … although after this reminder of cheese/Marmite toasties today I might buy an ‘ordinary’ loaf of bread! 

Today’s poem talks about bread – and we’re quite used to the idea of Jesus as the bread of life, but not so much about ourselves ‘as bread’ – to be prepared to be ‘dispersed’, but still – we can receive also:

You are the bread of life.
I trust you to feed me with a
fragment;
to fill me with the smallest
crumb.

Side Note: Thinking back to earlier posts re food waste, as I was looking for bread, I came across a BBC news story that someone has invented bread that will last for 60 days – which sounds a little wrong to me, although they are suggesting that it will cut food waste (have they not heard of freezers)!

#Do1NiceThing: Call in on an elderly neighbour – take some cake, have a cup of tea and a chat

I’m not sure I’d describe any of my neighbours as elderly – but we do regularly chat over the fence – usually in the summer though – up north we all dash in to get away from the wind!

Maggi Dawn

If we treat Lent as somewhat of a chance for a detox, a stoic event in which we seek to please a harsh taskmaster God – we have missed the point of Lent, and we have misunderstood God and his ‘graceful’ nature… In previous Lent, people gave up essentials as well as luxuries – to understand that ‘man shall not live by bread alone’!

Fasting in the Christian tradition is essentially about recognising that there’s nothing we can  do to improve ourselves. We are fallen creatures and need redemption, not cosmetic surgery. No amount of self-improvement will change God’s view of us – God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, who is not fooled by the way we present ourselves in prayer or religious observance, and who loves us anyway. We do not need to put on a show for him, and we cannot save ourselves apart from him.