Issue No. 10: The Mouthful
How to enjoy what you're given.
My daughter and I eat lunch together at the kitchen table every afternoon. Sliced apples, air-fryer chicken tenders, mashed sweet potatoes. I rip up the chicken, blow on it, and let it cool before putting it near her high chair. When I do, she swipes it with pink starfish hands and chews with seven little teeth, smiling open-mouthed to show me her work. Squirrels nibble acorns outside, empty shells clatter across the porch. Cardinals rustle at the bird feeder. We’re having a nice time.
But as I pick up an adult-sized piece of chicken, my daughter’s eating begins to slow. Her eyes widen. I eat, she stares, I eat, and she shakes. She cries. She begs, pounding her little fists and kicking her little feet. Please, she says without language. Please let me have the big chicken.
Does it matter that she already has chicken in both hands? Bites of chicken jammed in both cheeks? That she’s already choking from eating so much chicken? No. It doesn’t.
We do this every day, her and I. Over the weeks, I’ve come to understand it as a theological metaphor. This, I think, is how we must look to God: children with full mouths asking for food. I hardly ever pray with contentment, but with sentiments more like my baby’s lunchtime babble: Just a little more. More will be enough.
The Lord’s Prayer asks God to “Give us this day our daily bread,” which, in the era of Uber Eats and Instacart, feels like a historical nicety rather than an earnest request. But if the petition gestures toward ancient agrarianism, toward cultures built on millstones and threshing floors, it also offers new perspective on modern life.
In “Sapiens,” a favorite book of Mark Zuckerberg, Yuval Noah Harari explains how the transition from hunter-gatherer tribes to agrarian societies changed not just humanity’s diet—but its perception of time. Cultivating grain meant considering not just today, but tomorrow. Rather than face daily struggle against starvation, farmers cast their attention out weeks, months, and entire seasons at a time. The future, once vast and unknown, came into sharp relief: It could be measured by seed sacks in the barn. Excess food brought new political concerns: How could you protect your supply? Who could take it? Storehouses, walls, and armies ensued.
Most of us reading this newsletter on iPhones aren’t concerned about our next meal. We’re concerned with the future: Will we have enough money to retire? Will our kids be successful? Will our health hold up? Asking the questions is comforting because it implies answers might exist. We react to such uncertainty through comparison, examining our neighbor’s wealth, parenting ability, and physical health for insight about our own. We feel pride when we’re further along, envy when we’re short.
The effect of a future focus is cyclical: desire, accumulate, protect, repeat. You can draw a clear line from Instagram’s 2 billion monthly users, bombarded with products to consume and problems to fear, to Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million doomsday bunker in Hawaii. When you live for tomorrow, a bunker is your only hope.
So how can we live for today? Asking for daily bread may seem simple, but author Joy-Elizabeth Lawrence considers it to be radically complex: Praying to give “us” daily bread implies provision for everyone; those who live in suburbia and those who don’t. Praying for “this day,” underscores “the quotidian nature of our needs,” she writes, and “bread,” emphasizes “the simplicity of the request in a world of excess.”
Remembering these ideas—that our basic needs are simple, daily, and uncomplicated—can take the pressure off. We can re-center our gaze not on our uncertain future, but on our abundant present.
I sit at the kitchen table and share a meal with my daughter. We listen to the squirrels. We listen to the birds. We’re having a nice time.