The Bread

It's my turn to write The Bread this week. Which means I need to have them finished ahead of time. Which means I should have been writing them last week, but since I was working late most of the week, I didn't. So that's what I did all weekend when I wasn't at the wedding I went to or at church.

To explain, The Bread is a daily (workday) Christian devotional, not to be confused with The Daily Bread. It was started in the mid 1990s by someone at the Taco Bell headquarters as a devotional he sent to his Christian coworkers who were interested in receiving it. Later, it expanded to having about a dozen (give or take a few) "Bakers" who take turns writing it. Most of them don't work for Taco Bell or its affiliates anymore, but we keep writing. I've been one of the Bakers since, I think, early 1996.

But I've discovered, since I started this blog a couple weeks ago, that I can post something and have fun with it, but it's hard to sit down and write a Bread. Both are about what's going on in my life, except one is easy and one is difficult. Why?

It has to do with the importance. Skye Puppy is, as Lileks describes his Bleat, "dashed-off tripe," or at least it's as important to people's lives as dashed-off tripe. But The Bread is about God's Word and how it relates to my life and how it could relate to the readers' lives. And that makes it anything but tripe, which means that I had better not just dash it off and call it "good enough." I firmly believe that I will be called to account someday in eternity for the Breads I wrote and how I handled God's Word in them.

There are Breads I've written that I've poured my heart into, and people have replied that they're embarrassed for me because of how open I was about the ugly parts of my life. Other people thanked me for the very same Breads, because their lives got just as ugly, and my Bread gave them hope. It's worth every tough moment of baring my soul in the Bread to know that it has meant something to someone else. And that's my prayer with every Bread: that each one I write will touch even one person who needs just those words.

I just got an email this morning from a Bread reader who said she dropped off the distribution list when her email address changed, and she wanted to know if I had written any more Breads in November or December. She wrote (I've edited it a little), "I have saved your devotionals because they minstered to my spirit and I'm hungry for more."

What an incredible, undeserved, gift from God it is to receive something like that. To have my mistakes, my heartaches, my anger and all the rest, minister to someone and make her hungry for more is more than I could ask. It's more than I deserve. God is good.

Still, I write this post without much burden, and tonight I have one more Bread to write. Which one is more important? No contest. But I'll be back here tomorrow sometime, nonetheless.