Faithfully yours - It takes a world to make a loaf of bread
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- Published on Sunday, October 16, 2016
By Neil Strohschein
Neepawa Banner
We go through a lot of bread at our house. We use it for sandwiches, cheese toast, regular toast, etc. We buy at least four loaves at a time, which will probably last us for two weeks.
For us, getting a loaf of bread is easy. We go to the store, find what we’re looking for, pick it up, take it to the cashier and pay for it. Total elapsed time—roughly 30 minutes. We leave with a fresh loaf of bread that will help feed our family for several days.
But how often do we pause to identify and express our gratitude for all of the people who helped produce that loaf of bread? Here’s just a partial list. I will leave it to you to fill in the blanks.
Our encounter with the staff at a grocery store is often quite limited. We see those who take our money. What we don’t see is the work they do when they aren’t at the till—unpacking product, stocking and facing shelves, etc. In the retail world, you must be able to multi-task– if you can’t fit in wherever you are needed whenever you are needed, you won’t have a job for long.
Most of the bread we buy wasn’t baked in the store. It came from a central warehouse located in another community. So to the work done by those who put the product on the shelf for us to see and buy, we must add the work done by those who received, stored and then shipped it to the store and the trucker who delivered it.
Those in the warehouse didn’t bake the bread. It was made somewhere else. So now we add to the list all of those in the bakery who mixed the ingredients, baked the bread and after it cooled, sliced and bagged it for shipment to the warehouse.
The ingredients for the bread came from raw materials (flour, milk, eggs, sugar, yeast, etc.) that were either grown by farmers or produced by animals that were cared for by farmers. So to the work done by those already listed, we add the work done by the farmers who produced the raw materials, the processors who milled the flour, graded the eggs, extracted the sugar from cane or beets and pasteurized the milk. Don’t forget the truckers and railroad workers who delivered the products from one site to another so that they could be turned into bread for us to buy.
It takes a world to make a loaf of bread. It takes different people living in different cities with different skills; all of whom must do what they do best to produce the food we eat.
And overseeing the process, from beginning to end, is the God who created the land in which the wheat is grown; the God who created beets to give sugar, chickens to lay eggs and cows to give milk; the God who gave humans the ability to use the resources he created to produce food to feed the people of the world. He is the ultimate source of everything we receive.
No one said this better than St. James: “Every good and perfect gift is from above…” (James 1:17a) Just for today, take a moment to thank God for all of those who have had a hand in producing the food and other good things you enjoy. Then go out and do the same for them. Do your part to enrich their lives and help make ours a better world.
