Daily Bread

In the Lord's prayer we are instructed to pray for our daily bread, for our food today. As I sat today in a coffee shop, a coffee shop located in the area of Winnipeg referred to as "Hell's Kitchen" being named after the neighborhood in New York City, I thought of this. This is a coffee shop that was started by a church that calls this area of Winnipeg its home. I sat there before work, enjoying a cup of coffee and trying to focus my mind on work instead of on the current difficulties of my life. These current difficulties are the difficulties of owning an old vehicle, a vehicle that has recently broken down eight hours outside of Winnipeg causing me to miss work on Monday and suffer many stressful moments in the last few days.

As I sat and pondered this idea of daily bread I began to feel guilty for my recent hopes and prayers in regards to my crippled vehicle. Not that the worries, hopes, and prayers for things like crippled vehicles that belong to me or others are wrong but I think that there is a difference between these worries and this instruction to pray for daily bread. Maybe I should not be praying for the extras of life with such strength while I neglect praying for this daily bread. I look at people who I have met in my life and at people who I work with now; these people who are struggling with addictions, people who have lived through civil wars, people who have seen their children die. These people who deal day to day with things at a level of intensity that I doubt I have ever known, and I cannot help but feel these people have a much better understanding of daily bread than I do. So I come to think that this daily bread that Christ teaches us to pray for must be something that is far less shallow than prayers about vehicles, assignments for school or work, and other things of this manner. It seems to be something basic, something that is so basic that we, the 'unpoverished' of the world, seem to often forget about it because we are so distracted with extras of life.

I wonder if Jesus when teaching how to pray really was speaking of bread, or if he was speaking of something else that is so basic and fundamental to our existence that it only makes sense to compare it to such a simple food? Or maybe he was just talking about bread, or maybe Christ was meaning more than one thing when he taught this prayer.