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Manna This Morning

Published Date: June 20, 2014

by J. Ellsworth Kalas

   

   

As far as I know, I’m not Jewish, but in some ways I’m a direct descendant of the Children of Israel.  I feel for their experiences.  I want to sing with them when the Red Sea has turned from obstruction to deliverance.  Their fretting doesn’t appeal to me, but I know I would join the complaint chorus if out in the trackless desert there was no water to drink. 

My kinship is at its best when the Israelites are collecting manna.  I know, I know:  there’s a certain dullness in the same menu every day, every month, every year for forty years.  On the other hand, however, the predictability must have been marvelous.  Standing outside your tent in the evening with wilderness as far as the eye could see, it must have been very comforting to tell your family, “Fret not.  There’ll be food at the door tomorrow morning.  You can count on it.”

That’s the mood that blesses me in the words Thomas Chisholm, the Kentucky-Methodist-preacher-turned-insurance-man, gave us in his hymn, “Great is thy faithfulness.” Chisholm based the hymn on Lamentations 3:22-23, but it has manna written all over it.  “Morning by morning new mercies I see.  All I have needed, thy hand hath provided; great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.”

I need God’s mercy.  I need it every day.  I need “Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth.”  I need “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.”  And I have discovered, again and again, that in Christ there are “blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!”

Almost always I awaken with some song in my soul; that’s the beauty of a lifetime of loving the hymns.  But sometimes the vagrant voices of the enemy plague me with ugly self-appraisals.  Unfortunately, when the accuser does this he has a good backlog of material on which to draw.        

Then I see my manna, my “new mercies.”  I say to the Savior, “I didn’t know I had so much mercy in my account,” and He replies kindly, “You didn’t.  I made a new deposit in your account overnight.  I wanted you to have a good start this morning.”

I have an edge on Israel’s manna, of course.  Theirs always looked the same; mine comes wrapped differently each morning.  Sometimes the packaging is inauspicious; so much so that I don’t immediately realize that it’s mercy I’ve received.  I thought it was reproof or defeat, and instead I find mercy.

I wonder if some Hebrew women became an expert at preparing manna so that the family thought a rare vegetable was mixed in?  Over the ages the saints have learned how to see mercy each day, where others see, at best, coincidence, and at worst, trouble.  Godly thinking can make gourmet chefs of the least of us.

Mercies, new, every morning.  Manna on the soul’s doorstep, waiting to be taken.       

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