Thought for the Week

What is your favourite kind of bread – granary, oatmeal, baguette, tiger ( or giraffe depending on where you shop), or sourdough?

Do you like your curries with Naan? How do you like your toast?

Bread is so important that the Church’s best known prayer refers to it: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Even in a country with full shelves and mesmerizingly sophisticated supply lines, it’s a prayer that we haven’t dropped. We haven’t changed it for “Give us today more money?” or “Reassure us this value of our home?” or “Give us this day a faster car?”. Despite all our desires for sophisticated, more expensive objects, the Church’s prayer is still for bread.

This is partly because the Church lives in more countries than Scotland. There are still too many countries where daily bread isn’t guaranteed.

Indeed in our own country, as any volunteer at a foodbank will tell you, there are still too many who must pray this prayer with the possibility that tomorrow their stomach will be empty.

But for others, this is about acknowledging the beauty of the simplest gifts they will be given. Bread with its intriguing structures (ponder the engineering brilliance at work in the inside of a ciabatta) and beguiling smell, with all its highly compressed energy, with the taste that can be enjoyed by itself or in the company of a spreadable butter or an exotic dip, bread is good.

That’s why we still pray for it. It’s why every time we eat it, we might also pause to appreciate this spectacular answer to prayer. It’s why we are told in the stories of Jesus that every time he handled bread, he also gave thanks.

Rev Neil Glover, Flemington Hallside Church