The Two Breads

There are two kinds of bread in Scripture: (1) bread that comes up from the ground by the sweat of man's face and (2) bread that comes down from heaven as a free gift from God. One is a metaphor for the perishable life our flesh craves, the other for the life with God that our spirits crave. Bread in the Bible represents flesh. Who is not, to some degree, obsessed with some aspect of physical life? How much of a person's attention and fortune is spent on health, food and drink, beauty, fashion, romance, marriage, work, play, wealth, security, community, family, and death? God illustrates the entire drama of our perishable lives with a loaf of bread, and our generations with the grain from which it is made. I was a Mormon from about my twelfth birthday until my late thirties. I write this from the perspective of my midfifties, after a dark and terrible battle for spiritual freedom because of the vows I made. When I began to write the story of the two breads, I soon realized that it is really my story, and possibly yours.