Getting Your Hand Caught in Someone Else's Manna Jar

God calls each of us to both an individual relationship walk and a corporate relationship walk, but it is about the individual relationship walk that I want to talk about.

Each of us is called to a specific path to walk. We are each created by his hands to be a vessel to perform the tasks that he has planned for us to perform and as a vessel we work well when we are in the flow of what God intended us to be used for. For example, a delicate crystal pitcher would be a usable, but highly inadvisable vessel to serve chocolate chip cookies to 3 year olds in, just as a colander would be impossible to use as a punch bowl, and the metaphor could go on and on. But the point I am trying make is that we are made into a specific vessel that God blueprinted and designed for specific tasks that He called us as individuals to. And though we may hold and serve similar items at times, we are unique according to God’s purpose and plan. Which gets me to the reason I am writing this.

I was laughing over the concept of getting your hand caught in someone else’s manna jar last week, but it goes much further than that. This was pointed out to me today when someone tried to force me to take manna from someone else’s jar. They decided that because of where I am at in my journey that I was going the same place as someone else and I needed that other person to provide the ability to get there. There was no spiritual direction in this, just someone’s freely given opinion and it really hurt me for a while because it shook my faith, until I could get it all sorted out with God. Because God is the only person who can tell us ultimately where we are going and although he may give us words of wisdom through the council of others, we must line up what we are told within the context of what God is telling us individually. God calls each of us to walk a specific path and he provides each of us uniquely for the journey His has called us to. He gives each of us a manna jar to carry with us to hold the manna (blessings and supernatural empowerment) that he bestows on us to enable us to walk whatever path He called us to.

Sometimes there are only one or two pieces of manna in the jar, and sometimes it is stuffed to the top according to our needs at the time. But God always knows how much we need to keep walking. This is when it becomes important not to start looking at other people’s manna jars. God gives what we need to succeed in the tasks that He calls us to. Because someone else seems to have a manna jar stuffed with manna, you don’t know what they are going through that they need that kind of blessings and empowerment. We tend to think that people who are blessed in obvious ways have lives that are going great, but what we don’t see are the individual struggles that take place on their daily journey toward God. Not only do they need all the manna in their jar, but also, you don’t need it. Those are their blessings from God.

I would think that trying to get someone else’s manna would be like cursing yourself. Trying to take someone else’s manna is telling God that what He gave you isn’t good enough and being jealous of someone else’s manna makes your own manna, which is good and fulfilling, tastes like sawdust in your mouth. It was good and you were grateful for it until you started to compare it to someone else’s. The manna was good to the people of Israel and they were grateful for it until they started thinking about other things that they wanted to the point that they lost their gratefulness for what they had. Which is what my preacher talked about when he spoke of the people wining about the manna because they wanted melons. We need to be careful not to focus so much on the things that we want that we loose sight of the fact that God is providing all we need and become ungrateful. This is of course not a perfect metaphor but it gets me where I was trying to go with my understanding.

I guess ultimately what I am trying to get to in all this is this: We need to understand that each of us is in a unique place with a unique purpose designed by God and not one person is above or beneath another. We have just been traveling different lengths of time. Where a well-seasoned traveler may provide the wisdom on how to avoid a pit, the new traveler may provide a fresh way of looking at what has become commonplace.

I let someone shake my faith today because of my own insecurities, but God reminded me that I am on my own journey and that He will be with me the whole way and although the council of other travelers can many times be helpful in avoiding pits, I am to remember that the walk I have with Him, is my walk with Him and no one else has that specific walk. Ultimately, He will provide for me as I journey.

Of course, there is balance in everything, and we are called to walk together as a corporate body as well. We are called to help each other up when we stumble and to lend a helping hand when the way gets rough, but be careful when you are helping someone up, that you don’t trip them instead because of your own interpretation of their situation.