Bread of Love
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Pretzels Have Nothing
On
The Salt of the Earth,
…
Us,
Fed by the Spirit.
Deuteronomy 8:3
God humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
John 6:68
Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’
Words of Grace For Today
Brent and Nellie felt like that rag tag band of freed slaves stuck in the wilderness without water or food, though they had plenty of water, just not clean and safe water. Like those freed slaves they complained and then worked together to get a fire going, and keep it going, boiling water and drying out some essential clothing. Later they used it to cook fish for food. It was primitive, without a lot of variety in their diet, though they did find a few berries. Yet they were thankful each day that they were warm, dry, ate a bit, and, actually, survived.
Two weeks Brent and Nellie camped on that rock, fishing for food, and planning together how to be rescued. As unexpected and simply stunning to their rescuers their solution made use of their knowledge of chemistry and a lot of cooperative inspiration and ingenuity. They used fish guts, a hole bored into the hollowed out centre of a tree near shore, the dried out propellant from all but one flare, the remaining flare wedged into that bored out hole with fish guts as wadding and sealant, and a huge campfire to light that whole tree on fire.
The green tree resisted the fire, and then smoked like a Cuban cigar on a mission. The satellites overhead caught and dismissed all that smoke like any other fire. Then the burning tree finally lit all the flares propellant and launched the one burning red flare up 400 feet into the air. That was not dismissed by the satellite software. A rescue plane came to investigate. Brent and Nellie’s honeymoon ended with a helicopter ride to the hospital in Duluth, hot showers and freedom after a night of observation.
The rock had saved their lives, even as it had eaten their canoe bottom leaving them stranded. A friend brought them back to the island to make a video of them talking about their two week ‘camp out’ honeymoon. The challenges of surviving, and their cooperative efforts, mutual inspiration, and ingenuity leading to their rescue made an excellent video. The rescue people requested it to post online as a training video. It went viral. Most commented on were Brent and Nellie’s first and last comments in the video, that God was their Rock and salvation, more wondrous than the rock God had used to save them. They finished the video thanking each other, and repeating their ‘demonstration kiss’ of earlier that year.
That prompted their chem prof to ask permission to post their A+ demonstration of fission and fusion online. What only a handful of their friends knew is that Nellie’s autism and her highly muted emotions allowed her to initiate that A+ kiss. For her it was just part of the project. And then it was Brent’s highly emotional way of taking everything in (completely caught off guard by Nellie’s ‘demonstration kiss’ as he was) that prompted him to respond so surprised and then so ‘all-in’ that made that kiss so clearly a demonstration of fusion and love unbridled all at once.
What even fewer people knew at first, and more and more people slowly came to realize, is that God, the Rock and Salvation of all people, worked exactly that way, with everything available, to rescue us – always with mercy and love unconditional. Brent and Nellie knew well what Peter had said was true for us all, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’
Where will we go this day, with our dreams, our thoughts, our words, and our actions? Will we go grounded on God our Rock and Salvation, sharing God’s mercy and unconditional love with all?
Or will we go elsewhere?
And where could that possibly be?
Has God not humbled us enough to recognize that we do not survive on ‘bread’ alone, but we require love,
unconditional love?
And that love God alone provides to us, and from us for everyone else!
