manna – The Faith Cafe

Posted on September 12, 2022August 27, 2022 by Lori Cartmell

Don’t Get Used To It

Image by Tumisu, please consider ☕ Thank you! 🤗 from Pixabay

How would you feel if you won the lottery?

Pretty amazing, I’d imagine!

And the feelings of joy and gratitude at your good fortune would last for a long time, wouldn’t they?

Um, maybe not.

Researchers have discovered that positive feelings following a stroke of good luck soon subside and return to baseline. By the same token, people eventually adjust back to their baseline after some misfortune has befallen them.

This phenomenon is called “hedonic adaptation.” Whether your situation is good or bad, you get used to it.

I wonder if something like this happened to the children of Israel after being freed from slavery in Egypt.

Posted on February 22, 2021February 17, 2021 by Lori Cartmell · 2 Comments

The Recipe For Manna

Don’t you love recipes that are so simple that you can easily memorize them?

The ingredients list isn’t too long, and the items are probably measured in even cups or teaspoons, not fractions.

You’ve made the dish so often that the instructions are now fixed in your head. You don’t have to go rifling through your recipe box or searching your online files to find the recipe.

Even years later, you can still bring the recipe to mind and whip up the dish reliably.

You’ll never forget it.

There are things that God will never forget, either.

I heard a pastor say that “God has not forgotten the recipe for manna.”

God still remembers how to cook up whatever you need and get it to you!

Posted on January 7, 2021December 29, 2020 by Lori Cartmell · 5 Comments

Believe Six Impossible Things!

Alice In Wonderland Mad Hatter Tea Party. Image from Pixy.org CC BY-NC-ND-4.0

With 2020 behind us, it’s time to believe that good things are in store for us in 2021.

Are you having trouble believing that? Has your faith been a bit battered by the events of the past year? Do you find it difficult to believe that God has something good lined up for your future?

You’re not the only one to think certain things are simply impossible.

Have you read the book, “Alice in Wonderland,” by Lewis Carroll? At one point in the story, Alice is challenged by the White Queen to believe impossible things.

When the Queen says that she’s a hundred and one years old, Alice is incredulous.

“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again; draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed.

“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Even though this story is fictional, I think we as believers in God can learn a lesson from it. Sometimes God wants us to believe things that the world might consider to be “impossible.”

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Lori Cartmell · 1 Comment

The Perfect Recipe for Bread

There’s nothing quite like the smell of freshly baked bread in your own home, is there?

More and more people are finding this out. One of the surprising consequences of the pandemic-associated lockdowns has been a resurgence of home baking. So many people have been baking bread at home in recent months that some stores have even run out of yeast and flour.

For beginners, it might take some time to get the knack of baking bread from scratch. Even for more experienced home bakers, baking the perfect loaf of bread will take numerous tries and repeated tweaks to the recipe.

The Bible has a few things to say about this life-giving substance. By tracing the story of bread through the Scriptures, we can see how the “recipe” improves over time, culminating in something we all desire:

The perfect bread.