An omer of manna

A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with my pastor. We don’t talk often, but when we do, he has my back. Poo had hit the fan (again) and his question was blunt.

Are there financial needs that we can help you meet?

My answer was honest. There really weren’t. Thanks to great insurance and some other resources we are able to access, money was far, far down on my list of concerns.

A week later, I thought about calling my pastor back. At the suggestion of a friend of mine (who also happens to be a trauma-informed therapist and a fellow adoptive mom), we made an appointment with a holistic doctor. His approach to diagnosis and treatment is outside of the realm of “things covered by insurance.”

We spent a good chunk of change (and a good number of hours) at his office. And we came home with a ton more non-medicinal things to try. Whether they bring relief or not is still to be determined. But we came home with a box full of supplements and hope that we hadn’t yet exhausted all of our options.

Honestly, it’s money I can afford to spend and whether it buys us a little hope, a placebo effect or a miracle cure, I don’t regret it a bit. It’s just that the offer had been made literally days before.

I was reminded of a story that Richard Foster tells of letting God know that he needed a pair of gloves (even if he could easily afford them) and then pausing to see if God might provide them another way before buying them. And if not, buying them with gratitude to a God who provided the resources in the first place.

I didn’t make that call. I didn’t tell anybody how expensive that lengthy appointment was (though, to be fair, my big girl did… so it’s possible that word leaked that way). I just paused.

And, YOU GUYS, yesterday I got an envelope in the mail all ransom-letter looking. No handwriting. No return address. I was half-expecting it to be a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet (why do they send those with no return address anyway? What if I wanted to convert? Where would I go?). But no. It was a check. A ridiculously generous check that covered a whole bunch of that investment in holistic hope. Like almost all of it.

This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness.’ (Exodus 16:32)

Friends, we’ve been walking in the wilderness for half a year now. I keep thinking that we’ve turned the corner. Surely, we’ve turned the corner.

I don’t like the wilderness much. It makes me feel needy and dependent. Like all I’m doing is taking. And grumbling. And needing even more.

The wilderness sucks, friends. But the manna is still sweet. And still enough. And still there every. Single. Day.

And so, I want to gather up this omer of manna, this story of just right provision, just like Moses and Aaron. To bottle it up and save it and share it and use it as a reminder. To you– but mostly to me– that even here in the wilderness there is enough. Always enough. Because He is enough.