Her phone told her, which is a humiliating way to find something out.
Amber had been meaning to clear space and the thing offered to show her what was taking it up, and near the top of the list was a folder of audio she had not thought about in a while.
Two hundred and eleven talks. Downloaded, most of them listened to once.
She scrolled it for a bit, and what she noticed was not the number. It was that she could remember almost nothing about almost any of them, and that she had felt something during most of them, and that the something had not survived the following Tuesday in a single case she could point to.
Two hundred and eleven first times.
She is twenty-nine and she is not a shallow person. She works hard, she is faithful in a small group that she has not missed in two years, and if you asked anybody in her life they would say she is one of the most spiritually serious people they know.
She has simply found that only new material reaches her.
A song she has not heard. A speaker she has not heard. A passage handled a way she has not seen it handled. Those go in. And the same song in week three, the same passage on a Sunday morning in the ordinary rotation, the same three things said by the same good man who has been saying true things to her for six years, all of that arrives and slides off.
She has a word for it in her own head and the word is stale.
And what she saw scrolling that folder is that stale is not a description of the material. Two hundred and eleven talks cannot all have gone stale. Stale is a description of what her appetite now requires, which is novelty, and novelty is the one thing that by definition cannot be supplied twice.
She put the phone face down.
Because a person who can only be fed by first times has a supply problem that no amount of good material will fix.
And you may know that folder. Yours may be a playlist or a shelf or a habit of always reading somebody you have not read before, and the word stale may live in your head too.
The food came every single morning and it was the same food
Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it a long time and it was never yours.
You are not shallow for needing something to reach you. You never were. Scripture describes a people fed for forty years by the same thing arriving every single morning, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the freshness of the material, who does the feeding. Set it down here with the phone. It is heavy, and there is nothing to be ashamed of under it.
Now hear how the supply actually worked, because the arrangement is the point.
Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away.Exodus 16:21
Every morning. The same substance. For forty years.
And look at the second half of the sentence, because it is the half nobody quotes. It melted. You could not keep it. Yesterday's was not available today, and anybody who tried to hold some over found out why.
That is a supply designed to be received again rather than accumulated, and the people living on it had exactly your problem: there is a moment in that story where they complain about it, in almost these words, because it is the same thing again.
And the same thing again is what fed them out of a desert.
That supply is yours. Right now, at twenty-nine, on an unremarkable Tuesday. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who brings it, and He has never once made freshness the condition of nourishment.
Now let me be careful here, because a page like this could do harm and I have no intention of doing any.
Nothing on this page is a comment on how your church does anything, or on how often, or on the shape of it. That belongs entirely to your church and it stays where it is and I am not putting a view about it in your head.
And nothing here says the two hundred and eleven were a waste, or that new material is a trick. It is not. Somebody made most of those with care, and God has used new things in you and will again, and there is nothing spiritual about deliberately preferring the dull.
The point is only that a person who can be fed by the same thing twice has a wider supply than a person who cannot, and Scripture describes the wider one. His Spirit is the one who has been bringing it every morning of the two years you did not miss.
Here is the tender part, and Scripture is kind about it. You are not chasing novelty because you are bored of God.
You are chasing it because at some point in your twenties the familiar stopped registering, and a serious person who stops registering goes looking for something that will, and the looking is a sign of hunger rather than of shallowness. His Spirit put that hunger in you and He is not embarrassed by where it has been shopping.
So here is the turn, and it is the least novel thing in this message.
Eat one piece of bread slowly, sitting down, on an ordinary day.
That is the whole of it. Not a fast from new material, which would only be another interesting project. Not a decision to appreciate the familiar, which is a resolution and which is exactly the kind of thing that lasts nine days. One piece of bread, slowly, this week.
You are able to be fed by something you have had before. Not one day when your appetite is repaired. Now. His word describes forty years of the same substance arriving every single morning, and His Spirit is the one who brings it, and neither of them ever made novelty the price of entry.
I am not going to tell you what it will do or whether the familiar starts registering again this month. That belongs to God and He works in His own way and in His own timing, and I will not put a promise in His mouth to make this page land. What I can tell you is what is already yours, and what is already yours is a supply that arrives again tomorrow.
Eat the ordinary thing. It fed a nation out of a desert.
Declare this over yourself
Say these sitting down, out loud, on an ordinary day. Nothing here is a task and nothing here has to be earned; it is already yours in Christ, and it was true on every one of the two hundred and eleven mornings after. Scripture is what these lines stand on, His Spirit is the one who makes them live, and the outcome is His, answered in His own way and in His own timing.
- Word stale, you are not a description of the material and you never were, you are a description of what my appetite has started demanding. In the name of Jesus I put you down with this phone, because I come to this often, and it does not need to be rare to be holy.
- Requirement that it be a first time, you cannot be supplied twice by anybody and that is your whole problem. Scripture says they gathered it every morning and it melted by noon, and a supply that cannot be stockpiled is a supply designed to be received again.
- Lord, the same thing every morning fed a nation out of a desert, and Your Spirit is the one who brought it down, and You have never made freshness the price of being fed. Tuesday is a day You are on, and I am eating the ordinary thing this week.
Exodus 16:21
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.