I Say Daily and I Mean Sunday

He has said the line about four thousand times, at a rough count, and he did the rough count in the truck.

Keoni is thirty-seven. He has been saying it since he was five years old standing next to his grandmother, before he understood a word of it, and he says it now with a whole room and he means it.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And in July, for no reason he can identify, the word daily came off the page at him in the middle of a Sunday morning and would not go back on.

Daily.

He said it and then he was not listening to the rest of it, because a question had opened up in him and it was this: when did he last ask God for something that had to arrive today?

Not this year. Not this decade, that he can point to.

He asks for things. He is not prayerless and he would say so. He prays about his sister and about the yard and about a decision at work that has been dragging since spring. But every single one of them is a long-range request. Things that could come whenever. Things where today and next March would both be acceptable.

He has never once put a request in that had a deadline of tonight.

And he understood, sitting in his own truck afterward with the door open and one foot on the ground, that he says a daily prayer on a weekly schedule, and that the two words in it he does not really believe are this day.

He is not in trouble. He has enough. That is part of it and he is honest about that.

But there is something a man does not learn about God if he never needs anything before dark, and Keoni has arranged a life in which he never does, and then wondered for about six years why the whole thing feels like it is happening at a distance.

And you may say the same line. You may have said it four thousand times, and you may have never once meant the two smallest words in the middle of it.

The smallest request in the prayer is the one with a clock on it

Let me take something off you before we go further, because you have carried it since July and it was never yours.

You are not being kept at a distance. You never were. Scripture puts a request with a clock on it in the middle of the prayer Jesus taught, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the size of the need, who brings anything to a person. Set that down here on the rail. It is heavy and it has been in the truck with you since the summer.

Now hear the line on its own, because it is easy to say and hard to hear.

Give us this day our daily bread.Matthew 6:11

Six words, and two of them have a deadline in them.

Look at what is not in that sentence. Nothing enormous. No deliverance, no calling, no decision that has been dragging since spring. Bread, which is the least dramatic thing anybody eats, asked for on the day it is needed.

And notice where it sits. It is in the middle of a prayer that opens with the Name and the kingdom and the will, which are the largest things there are, and then comes straight down to a loaf for today.

That is deliberate. The prayer goes from the biggest thing in existence to the smallest thing on a table in four lines, and both ends belong to the same Father.

You are able to ask like that. Right now, at thirty-seven, with enough in the cupboard. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who carries a request like that, and He has never once required a man to be desperate before He would take it.

Now let me be careful here, because a page like this could do damage.

Nothing on this page is a comment on how your church does anything or how often. That belongs to your church and it stays exactly where it is, and I am not putting a view about it in your head.

And nothing here says having enough is a fault, or that you should manufacture a shortage in order to feel closer. That is a bad idea and God has not asked it of you, and a man with a full cupboard is not further from Him than a man with an empty one. Scripture never once makes need the price of nearness.

The point is only that a prayer with a clock in it has been said four thousand times without the clock, and Scripture put the clock there on purpose. His Spirit is the one who was carrying it every one of those times whether or not you meant this day.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it straight because you are a straight man. What you found in that truck is not that you have been faking it.

It is that a man can love a line for thirty-two years and never once let it be about today, and today is where he actually lives. His Spirit has been in every one of those Sundays and He is not disappointed in a single one of them.