Breakfast That Fell from the Sky

The people of God were a long way from home.

They were walking through a wilderness, a wide, dry, empty place with no gardens, no bakeries, and not one field of golden grain. Only sand and sky, and the rumble of hungry tummies.

And they were afraid.

"What will we eat?" they cried. "There is nothing here. Nothing at all. We will go to sleep hungry, and wake up hungry, and tomorrow there will still be nothing."

Have you ever felt like that? Worried there might not be enough? Enough food, enough room, enough love to go around, enough for YOU?

God heard every word. He did not scold them for being afraid. Only a little while before, at Marah, he had turned bitter water sweet for these same worried people, and he had not stopped caring for them since. Now he leaned close, the way a good father leans close to a frightened child in the dark. And he made them a promise.

"In the morning," he said, "you will see."

So they lay down under the stars. And while they slept, God was already at work.

When the sun came up, something strange and wonderful lay all across the ground. It was thin and white, like frost, and soft, like the first snow. The people picked it up and turned it over in their hands.

"What IS it?" they asked each other.

And that became its name. Manna. It means, "What is it?" Bread with a question for a name!

They tasted it. Sweet, like honey on warm bread. And the most wonderful part: there was enough. Enough for the big families and the small ones, enough for the strong and the weak, enough for every single person, gathered up in the cool of the morning.

Bread, falling from the sky. Breakfast, sent straight from the heart of God.

God did not give them one great mountain of manna all at once. He gave just enough for that day. And the next morning, there it was again. And the next. And the next.

Every single morning, God came down with breakfast. As if to say, over and over: I am still here. I have not forgotten you. There will be enough for you tomorrow, too.

Day after day, year after year, God fed his hungry, wandering children, and never once missed a morning.

But bread can only fill a tummy for a day. Deep down, the people were hungry for something more, a hunger no breakfast could quite reach.

So long after, when the time was just right, God sent something better than manna. He sent his own Son.

One day Jesus stood among hungry people and said the most astonishing thing:

"I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry."

All those mornings in the wilderness were a whisper of him. Every soft white flake on the ground was a promise that the true Bread was on his way.

And on the very next page, God's children will be thirsty again, and God will do something even stranger than sending bread from the sky. He will pour water out of a rock.