happie birthday hannah

below is one of the many pieces hannah has written that i adore.

[Yesterdays Manna] (gluten free manna that is)

Your condition surprises you? Overwhelmed by weakness and fatigue, sorrow and desperation, you have questioned your restlessness? You have questioned your disinterest? This bread, stale and eaten by curling worms, does not appeal to you; the crumbs you gather from it do not fill you. But you try to feed on it and are surprised that it makes you sick. You are afraid, weeping tears of discontentment, crying out in frustration, in longing, ill and empty, hungry and too weary to gather food.

Have you been trying to live on yesterday’s manna? Have you let the memory of its freshness make you think it is enough for today? Are you hoarding yesterday’s wisdom, forgetting that there is more, in abundance, for the present? Are you clinging to the knowledge that sustained you in the past and forgetting the call to increase your wisdom, running without food and wondering why the exertion makes you dizzy?

You ask yourself: where is my love? where is my grace? where is my joy? But are you eating yesterday’s manna? You who have tasted, taste again. Go to the fields; they are abundant with promise and full of sustenance. The word you were given yesterday was enough for that day. But there is a new word for this day. A new command. A new promise. A new blessing. A fresh remembrance that will set your soul at peace again. Each look upon God reveals a new side of His character, a new reason to cry “Holy.” Go again to the fields and gather fresh manna.

Labor to maintain a sense of thine entire dependence upon the Lord’s good will and pleasure for the continuance of thy richest enjoyments. Never try to live on the old manna, nor seek to find help in Egypt. All must come from Jesus, or thou art undone forever. -Charles Spurgeon

--Hannah Clarkin