This My Salvation

Driving home on a country road, the moon hangs, suspended glow over the trees and I remember how I have found saving grace in its light. And I begin to think about this my salvation.

My salvation has been a matter of preservation. How can the faith of a five year old be kept fresh all these years? How does it keep from going stale?

Only because God has sent his daily bread, manna from heaven, each morning and evening. It is only the mystery of grace, falling from the sky. Last year’s bread is long gone, and even yesterday’s will not be enough for today. He has renewed me constantly, opening his hand and providing food in season.

It has drifted down in the mercy of snow. It has been the moon, a silver wafer offered to unclean lips. It has been every word proceeding from his mouth, plucked from the fields of Scripture. It has been gathered on my blistered knees, searching desperately for just the crumbs from his table.

This is bread I have not baked. This preservation is not of my doing. I have only opened my hands, my mouth willingly, to receive what he gives.

Oh I have at times been seated at the table of fools, eating the cake of deception, frosting gone to dust and ashes on my tongue. I have tried to hoard and hide, stubbornly feasting on my own fermentation. I have nearly starved on self-reliance because I would not get up and gather his provision. I have turned his grace aside, only to find there is nothing else.

Nothing but manna, and what is it? and some days I cannot tell, I cannot taste, I cannot know how what has fallen can be what is good. I can only eat, and yet I can testify that brokenness has become wholeness, because all manna is from the mystery of the one loaf, broken for all.

He is bread and bread is life, and I must eat or die. And this is how I live. This is how I am saved, this is how he saves me even now.

And falling grace leaves rainbow trails in the rain clouds and rises bigger than the moon on a September night, reminders that this His salvation is all around.


~lg