All You Need Is Daily Bread

Faith walking can be so challenging sometimes. It's easy to believe God for things when things are easy, when your needs are met and when your on the mountaintop. It's even easy to believe God when times are tough and challenging, you know you’ll make it and you know you’ll get through because you can see an end in sight. I find it most challenging to exercise my faith muscle, not when things are amazing or even difficult to navigate, it is hardest for me when I have no clue what to expect. When I have no direction or insight for the future. When nothing around me makes sense and when I realize I have absolutely no control.

Entrepreneurship has been that kind of of “mustard seed” faith journey for me. From the moment we made the decision that I would quit my job back in 2010, it's been moving ( from season to season waiting for the day when the ball would drop. When clients would stop booking and realize I was really a photography fake and I’d have to return to work in a bad economy, if any employer would have me or be able to make room for me. My first year of business, I experienced this the most. Every two weeks my husband would get paid and I would wait and hope I could match his contribution so that we could manage our bills and maybe have a little leftover for a date night to Taco Bell. Quitting my 9-5 and surrendering to self-employment was a true faith jump for us and a move that we didn’t really prepare for, but just knew was right. We did it because we HAD to. Our “knower” (the Holy Spirit) was urging us that the time was right and so we leapt. We leapt during the worst possible season for our area; winter. We leapt into a crazy slow season and we were faced with the toughness of things, the harsh reality of being on our own. I broke down every couple of days as I looked at the bills stack up and the shelves in our refrigerator empty. As summer came in the Pacific Northwest, life got better but as we moved into fall, I would find myself nervous all over again.

I really couldn’t even begin to look at my situation differently until one day while talking to my friend Annie about the burden of being on your own in business, she reminded me that God has prepared us for these times in his prayer with the sweetest promise.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

She reminded me that looking past today was more than I needed to do. That fixating on the future was a burden that I didn’t have to carry.

She reminded me of God’s Word in Matthew 6:25-26 (The Message) that says:

If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don’t fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God and you count far more to him than birds.

And as I sat and meditated on the simple phrase “give us THIS day our daily bread,” the lack didn’t seem to matter anymore. I had enough for the moment. In fact, all of a sudden I had more than enough. You see the promises of God are true. They aren’t in vain and it's not about what we don’t have, it's really not even about what we have, it's what we do with and how we posture our hearts in the moment to see what God is doing in our lives at all times. When I could wrap my mind and heart around the fullness of my life once I viewed it the way God did, I had enough to do the things that needed to be done and had extra to do the things I wanted as well. I could see God’s complete and fully present faithfulness on and over my life and I was able to admit that He had done His part and was remaining true to His promises to and for my life. That daily bread lesson has been all I have needed to walk through the hardest financial, spiritual and emotional times in my life the last ten years.

I believe that I serve a faithful and right-on-time God. I believe that God is still doing miracles. I believe that God is faithful to do exceedingly abundantly above all I can think or imagine, but I know he needs me to do my part to change how I think about Him and my situation. When I can do that, He can do anything. Father, give me what I need this day because this day is the only one that counts.

With strength, courage and wisdom,

Tash