Daily Bread

Daily Bread

Give us today our daily bread.

Matthew 6:11 (NIV)

For me the Christmas season starts with the arrival of a care package from my stepmother. Every year Susan packages up peanut brittle, chocolate-dipped Oreos, exquisite sugar cookies, and other homemade creations.

“I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make—pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad—but it carries a certain taste of memory,” writes Mitch Albom. The same is true in an Amish home.

A few of one Amish family’s favorite foods include pumpkin pie, chicken noodle soup, apple butter, chow-chow, soft pretzels, homemade doughnuts, and half-moon pies. Cooking is often a family event. Here is an example from the book Visits with the Amish:

Since it’s 11:00 in the morning, the girls begin to prepare dinner, their main meal of the day.

Grace washes and tears apart some fresh leaf lettuce. “It’s from our sister Mary Edna’s garden,” says Annie. “This year we couldn’t plant lettuce because it rained so much. But my sister’s garden is on a slope, so she could get hers in.”

Annie mixes a meatloaf using beef they butchered last fall. Regina peels potatoes and shows me how to poke the potatoes into a crank-style stainless steel shredder without getting my fingers nicked. . . .

In the large Yoder kitchen, long and wide counters provide spacious work areas for all the daughters.

For the Amish, food brings not only the “taste of memory,” but its preparation makes memories too.

The daily bread that God’s Word speaks of refers to everything necessary to sustain life. Just as our bodies are dependent on food, our lives are daily dependent on God. We need Him, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

Dear heavenly Father, thank You for our daily bread and for memories that come from enjoying food with family.