Luke 11:3

     Give us this day our daily bread.
     This request that Jesus taught his disciples to make is a reminder of the fact that God cares about our physical needs and that Jesus didn’t expect his followers to be unaware of that. The world and life in it is good; after all, God created it.
     The prayer Jesus taught may be understood as outline, or brief mentions of whole categories. Daily bread can be seen as representing all that is needed for the needs of physical life. Luther, according to one scholar said that to pray for daily bread was to pray for that which is needed to have and enjoy one’s daily bread. And, at the same time, it is to pray against everything that interferes with enjoying it.
      As we pray for daily bread, perhaps we are praying for the storekeeper who brings the bread or flour, for the truck driver who delivers it, the miller who grinds it, the farmer who grows the wheat, the fields lying under the sky.
     Of course, this study is being written in a land of abundance. Many people in this world of abundance are often more worried about how their daily bread is affecting their waistlines, than they are about having it in the first place. In the United Methodist Women’s study, Food and Faith, from a few years ago, it was pointed out that simplicity of eating was most common through most of human history. For special occasions humans feasted, but the rest of the time, fare was simple, even sparse. But in today’s affluent societies, “feasting” happens every day and we have lost the understanding of it, having to amp up what we have continuously in order to have the sensation of feasting.

What does this say in a world in which there are still people whose daily bread is seriously in question? Should this portion of the prayer call upon us to look at the difference between need and want?
How often are the two confused in this society?