I am sure your weekly worship service includes the Lord’s Prayer. Likely, you find yourself praying that same prayer often during the week, sometimes daily with your family. How often have you noticed that you are not praying for daily bread for yourself alone, but for yourself and others? The words are very carefully translated as “us” and “our.”
This prayer puts each one of us into a collective humanity with all the other people of the world. In our United States, that puts us in the category of people who may not have access to “daily bread,” and may not have enough to feed themselves or their families. It is difficult to think of ourselves as without bread, but according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is our country’s most vital anti-hunger program, serving some 41 million people in 2024.
Try looking at it this way: the entire population of the New York metropolitan area is 19 million, Los Angeles is 13 million, and Dallas-Fort Worth is 8 million. SNAP serves more people than those three major metro areas combined. More people in the U.S. than we can truly imagine are hungry!
Passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” means that more than half of current SNAP recipients are projected to lose some or all of their benefits, according to the Urban Institute. Any trip to the grocery store tells us that the cost of food has increased. What will happen to those 20 million people? Many of them will find their way to their neighborhood food shelf — or to their neighborhood church.
God calls us personally, and as congregations, to find ways to be a part of helping to provide “daily bread” to all who are included. We are reminded whenever we pray, “Give us today OUR daily bread.” It is certainly God’s work, but our hands, feet, and billfolds are part of the answer.
Vernita Kennen
Incarnation, Shoreview
(Thanks to the ELCA World Hunger’s Hunger Sermon Starters, 7/29/25, for some of the ideas and the links in this blog.)
