Foraging Faith.

BY SARAH SHEARER

Sarah is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied nonfiction writing and French. She loves finding stories within people and bringing them to life — when she’s not watering her basil plant or making kombucha in her kitchen.

On the last day of 2019, I flipped my laptop open on the couch and created a blank document to write resolutions that would never come. I’ve realized that I like the concept of accomplishing a goal more than the actual goal itself, in the same way that the ideal of being wholly healthy more effectively pushes me to eat green beans than setting a goal of eating two cups of greens a day. 

I like it because, to me, this is a freeing thing. With the one thing, this one goal hanging ahead of me, it moves me toward that goal in a variety of different ways I make up as I go.

This is probably why I’ve decided to look at 2020 like an open field. Picture the tall grass, the sun rising and falling like a well-kept habit and my footfalls drawing some kind of line through it. This is the kind of thing I can handle. 

I think part of the appeal of a landscape like this is the open space: there’s room in a field to discover, to go to the left and then to the right, to bend my knees and jump into the air and then dig them into the ground and lean close to the earth. There’s space to get down and search for the pieces and blessings I haven’t seen before. And it’s about something else, too — perhaps even prominently — manna. 

In the Bible, manna is the substance the Israelites survived on while they wandered in the desert (check out Exodus 16 for context and a fuller picture of the story. These people were in for a wild ride). It’s the bread from heaven sent to sustain these wanderers when they’d decided there was no hope left. They’d thrown in the towel. Given up the discipline plan on day three.

For the Israelites, manna looked like dewdrops of bread appearing on the ground around them each morning. A “fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground” waiting to be scooped up and eaten.

This is the stuff I’m looking for in the field. It’s not about goal setting. It’s not about a resolute attitude. It’s the habit of getting down on my knees and scraping the manna for today up from the ground. It’s the faithfulness of bending down because I believe there’s something there to pick up. 

Some manna Sparknotes:

1. It’s miracle food. Manna is pretty much universally acknowledged as a wonder, a marvel. This is a huge mind-shift for me. Seeing manna in life has got to be about seeing God’s hand in the every day as the awe-inspiring thing it is.

2. It’s heaven-sent. Again, a miracle.

3. It’s an exercise in faith. God’s manna to the Israelites disappeared every day just to reappear the next morning. If they tried to hoard some for the future, it went bad. Crucial to the plan was teaching the Israelites a faith that trusts God for today, and for tomorrow too — even if they didn’t have tomorrow’s sustenance yet. They had to believe He would provide. We need to believe that He will provide.

If you’re joining me, we’re going to need to really look. I have no intention of running out into the streets of Paris for dew on the stony sidewalks — The manna’s not going to feel the same in 2020. We’re not Israelites wandering shoeless with no food — in fact, we have more than we could ever need — Bread. Information. Choices. 

But on that last day of 2019, I realized something: it’s too easy to forget that we have enough. It’s too easy to let the gratitude collecting inside of me slip between my fingers at the slightest inconvenience. So one of my biggest 2020 projects, as I move forward in the field, isn’t a SMART goal — it’s to steadily make my life as a house for gratitude. Are you in?

Manna will be the building blocks. I believe it’s everywhere, and the first step is to routinely set my eyes to find it  — to really look, and have my bucket ready to collect. And so that’s what’s happening. I’m living with my eyes open, a bucket to collect and a journal to remember — logging faithfulness is a guard against forgetting. 

Here’s my January manna log:

 #1: One hour of dry skies during a week of rain when I really needed it.

#2: Keeping my laptop closed when all I wanted to do is write, bending to the tug on my soul that needed to be filled by the Word of God before I could pour it out onto the page.

#3: Sitting down on the train after a 2-month transportation strike in France.

#4: A relationship that has continued to unfold in deep grace. 

#5: Little Women. (Did anyone else’s soul just need this movie?)

I don’t know what the manna for the weeks to come will be yet. But I’ve got my notebook flipped open and glasses on. Let’s get on our knees and prepare for the miracle.