One day when our Sunday School class was discussing Corrie ten Boom’s description of Amsterdam at the end of World War II; of the eighteen wheeler trucks from Canada waiting at the border for the Armistice, to move in and deliver food for the starving Dutch population, Peggy DeRuyter exclaimed , “I saw those trucks! I saw them in Holland!” She had been a child at the time. “It must have been a big relief to see them,” I said. “Yes, she answered, but the real relief, the food we lived on, was the food that came from the sky.” “Do you mean the CARE packages from the U.S.?” I asked. “Yes, she said. “Those are what saved our lives and fed us.”

It has been estimated that more people in Europe , and especially in The Netherlands, died of starvation than on the battlefields during World War II.

Peggy was a Dutch woman who had immigrated to the United States with her family and with the sponsorship of a Lutheran church. She passionately loved the country that sent food, and that she now called “home.”

Peggy could identify with the Hebrew people as they found “food from the sky” every morning on the floor of the desert. She knew what it was to be aware that someone was conscious of her plight and moving out of sheer fellowship with her and her people to come to her relief.

The manna that Moses’ people received sustained them for forty years in the desert. It was part of the glue that bonded the people to their God. It was the most elemental means by which God displayed His Fatherhood, by feeding His family of human beings: I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. . . This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (John 6:48-51)

More than three thousand years after the Hebrews woke up to manna on the desert, we go to communion and partake of a piece of bread or a wafer and a sip of wine or grape juice to celebrate the very flesh of God’s presence with us. The communion opens the door to the passionate gratitude of souls who are offered eternal life from the son of God. We receive a glimpse of the joy Peggy received, and the stirring of grateful love for the One who calls us His own, even when we barely know Him. This is the bread that comes down from heaven. . . whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

(John 6:58)

Love in Him,

Prue