As a pastor, I get to hear a good many ‘if-onlies.” As in “if only I had timed the market better,” “if only I had landed that other job,” “if only I didn’t have these health problems...”. Nearly all of us come up with an ‘if-only’ from time to time. But we also know people who became prisoners to them, to if-onlies that are rooted in the past, an endless pool of regret in which to drown: “if only I had that relationship to do over,” and also those ensnared by if-onlies that look relentlessly to the future, as in “if only I had another hour each day to spend with my kids,” or “if only I can get through the next few months at work.” At times we take our if-onlies to God, as in “Lord, if only you would make this go away, do this for me, I’d be happy.” Today, I’d like to share with you a wonderful story, even a humorous story, of an if-only prayer, with the unnerving outcome that God actually heard answered it with a “Yes.” As we will see, getting just what you’ve been craving is not always as satisfying as we expected…

Our story begins in the not-often-traveled Book of Numbers, the tale of the trials and adventures of the Hebrew people in the desert after their flight from Egypt. In Chapter 11 we meet “the rabble,” which is the Bible’s way of referring to a group of those who had left Egypt with the wagon train, but who lacked faith in God or any enthusiasm for the journey. Showing a unique ability to see the drinking gourd as half-empty, the rabble did not focus on how God was providing for the Hebrews at every critical juncture, from making a way through the sea to providing manna, the mysterious, flaky substance that could be gathered each morning and made into a sort of bread. The rabble focused upon what they did not have, but very much craved.

And that…was (surprise, surprise) food. I realize that it may surprise many of you that anyone would ever crave food. But the rabble did. “If only we had some t-bone steaks!” they whined. “MMmmmm, wouldn’t that be great? Remember back in Egypt there was an Outback on every street corner: right about now, I’d be having a Blooming Onion and a BBQ rib platter. But we’re out in the boonies now. They don’t even have Wendy’s here! All we have out here is…manna!” The rabble were tired of manna, you see. It was monotonous: gathering it every day, making a paste out of it, baking it, eating it. You couldn’t store it up for a rainy day, either. God sent it every morning, but it wouldn’t keep. That meant getting up early to glean it, every day.

So the rabble looked back to how great it was to be slaves in Egypt. At least there, Outback was open 24 hours! They sent up a big “if-only” wail, doing what if-only thinking always does, pointing to the future or the past, locating happiness somewhere in Egypt, but certainly not here, in the present, where we’re stuck dealing with the measly, monotonous morsels that God keeps doling out.

But you know, when we cast away the present day, sacrifice it on the altar of the past or the future, the manna tends to go away. You see, the manna vanished if the people did not gather it up with the rising of the sun. Put another way, whatever God puts before you this day, whatever ordinary or extraordinary blessing you encounter today, it’s all gone at day’s end. God chooses to deal with us in the present, because God knows that for creatures like us, today is the only place that contentment is possible. Days spent daydreaming about the past or hankering for the future ignore the little graces in our lives, the holy things that make a moment precious and a day worth living.

So did you awaken today to a day worth living? I can see that many of you did. But nearly all of us need a reminder from time to time that faith is not the continuing echo of a day in the past, when we got saved, nor is faith merely a ticket to Heaven in the sweet by-and-by, in the future. We must never forget that of the 200-some times Jesus mentions the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospels, in all but four or six of them he is speaking not of the future, but of the Kingdom’s significance to the right now , using an imperative present tense to let us know we need to live life well, fully and gratefully, today . Because in fact, that’s all we get.

We could leave it at that: live-for-the-moment, seize the day, think-positive! And thinking positive is good. But note that back in the desert, God heard the complaint of the people Israel, how they were hunkering for something tastier than manna. So God sent quail, loads of them, into the camp, and before long it was a full-scale culinary quail-fest. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, they had quail dumplins, quail fritters, quail a-la-mode, Southern fried quail... The people ate so much and so ravenously that some of them actually choked on the meat, and had it, ahem : coming out of their noses – an awkward and unpleasant phenomenon my eight-year-old refers to as “narfling.” They were drowning in what they’d been craving - so much so they narfled it!

Maybe your grandma used to say to you, “be careful what you wish for, ‘cause you may just get it!” All too often, what we crave just does not end up satisfying us when we get it. Moreover, it may crowd out the hidden blessings that God spreads out for us to discover in our daily walk. We trample that manna underfoot, thinking “if only I can make it through this day…”

But I wonder: what manna is God offering you, today, for your journey? Could your bread of Heaven be the simple, daily routine of gathering up your joys and cares in prayer, as you greet the rays of the sun? Could your daily bread be a covenant with another traveler, in a Bible study or a prayer group, to hold one another accountable to disciplines of prayer and holy living? Could your day bring a new way to serve someone in need in the name of Christ, a call to greater generosity or a new way of giving? What if we could see the blurs made in our lives by our children, our friends with more clarity, if we were only asking “what are you putting before me this day, Lord? And what would it take for me to notice it and gather it up?”

By high noon, the Bible says the manna was gone. They had to stoop down, and gather it up - like the gift of each new day. They couldn’t store it up for tomorrow. It was this day’s bread, manna from Heaven. Some even learned that, when you got over craving what you had back in Egypt, the taste of manna was rather sweet.

To the One who always listens when we ask for our daily bread, be all our thanks. Amen.