The Original Convenience Food

The Original Convenience Food

Women And Manna

Read: Exodus 16:11-15; Numbers 11:7-9

Homemade Dinners in Twenty Minutes. The title caught my eye, but as I flipped through the book, I saw that the meals were based on ready-to-serve convenience foods. This is home cooking? I thought. Opening packages and cans? I remembered the pie from last night’s dinner, made with cherries I had picked from our tree, then pitted and baked in a homemade crust. Our breakfast had included muffins made with applesauce that I had made after a trip to the orchard, as well as raspberry jam made from berries I had picked at a farm. Maybe I go too far to the other extreme.

The women in today’s Bible passage knew something about convenience food. During the forty-year period that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, God provided for them by raining down food from heaven each morning. Exodus 16:31 describes the white manna as tasting like honey wafers. All the women had to do was walk out of their tents and pick up as much as their families needed. True, they still had to prepare it, but at least they didn’t have to kill it, skin it, and cut it up. Each day, the women knew what was on the menu. They just had to decide whether to boil it or bake it.

Many people think that spiritual growth should be quick and easy, like cooking with convenience foods. But we can’t open up a package of godliness. We don’t just flip open our Bibles and understand God. Becoming like Christ takes hard work. Although our salvation is a gift, many Scriptures urge us to work and study to become who God intends us to be. While I don’t always have time these days to cook from scratch, I do need to find some time each day to prepare my heart for God. I’ll find the ingredients listed in his Book.

Work at living a holy life.

Hebrews 12:14