Sunday Devotion- By Bread Alone

Noel De Vries

Last Friday, my nano broke.

I was not happy—in fact, I wanted Apple’s guts for garters. The nano’s brand new, and Fridays are my War and Peace days, the days I listen to three hours of Tolstoy while making my rounds with the vacuum and dust cloth. As I tied back my hair I prayed, "God, calling customer support, sending in my ipod, this is not what I want to be dealing with right now."

While I was thinking that, I heard my mother's voice in the back of my mind, the maddening comment all mothers make whenever things go wrong: "It’s happening for a reason." Teenagers go yeah, whatev. However, since I’m now a whole fifteen months out of that stage, I sagely hearkened unto her voice. "Yes, it probably is happening for a reason. But God, it'd better be a good one. And I mean really good. And the only reason good enough that I can think of is that you use those static hours to give me the rest of my plot." I’d been hacking away at this children’s book two and a half years, mainly getting nowhere, and honestly doubted that God would tie a bow on anything in three hours.

But guess what? By ten o’clock Friday night, I had my plot. Like, all of it.

And Saturday morning, my ipod started working again.

"And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live." Deut. 8:2-3