They ate of the food of the land

Then the manna ceased on the day after they had eaten the produce of the land; and the children of Israel no longer had manna, but they ate the food of the land of Canaan that year. – Joshua 5v12

29 March 1970. I was fourteen years old, the same age as our Eoin. I was in the 9^th grade at R.L. Stone Junior High. The third moon landing flight, Apollo 13 was due to lift-off in a couple of weeks. The Kansas City Chiefs were Super Bowl champions. Dana had just won Eurovision for Ireland with ‘All kinds of everything.’ The Vietnam War was raging. Everton were on their way to winning the First Division football title and Chelsea would win the FA Cup. There were no consumer available computers and the ARPAnet, ancient ancestor of the internet, had just been developed linking four computers in California and Utah. The first email was a year away. Less than 1% of American homes had microwave ovens and only the rich and famous had telephones in their cars. Even the electronic digital watch was not on the market yet.

Forty years is a long time. Imagine spending all that time wandering around a desert, moving from place to place, and setting up and breaking down tents. It had been forty long tedious years since God has showed the marvellous lands they had were to one day possess. The land flowing with milk and honey with its huge clusters of grapes was so close, and yet so far away.

Finally, after all that time they are able to eat ‘the food of the land of Canaan.’ Isn’t it sad that they missed out on the blessings for so long just because of their lack of faith? They could have spent all that time raising their children in the comfort of the Promised Land, but they missed it because they did not think God was strong enough to give them what He had promised.

I wonder what blessings we miss because we don’t trust God. What kind of ‘food of the land’ do we miss out on because we have to solve things our way? How much do we miss while life rolls by?