Today, on the desperate borders of Syria and Jordan, today in Liberia and Lesotho, today in Bangladesh and Burma, there are people asking – praying – for bread.
If you’ve never lived in a place where people couldn’t even put bread on the table for their children, let alone find enough for themselves, it’s hard to imagine the desperation, the absolutely focusing of desire, involved in being hungry. It is sobering to realize that this is still the daily reality for about a third of the world’s population.
And Jesus asks us to pray for bread. What is he on about, given that those of us who have enough bread hardly think about it at all, and those who do not, can scarcely think of anything else?
Let us consider this matter from two different directions in relation to the question of prayer.