Bread on the Table

1 Timothy 6v6(-8) is the Lent verse for today:

A devout life does bring wealth, but it’s the rich simplicity of being yourself before God. Since we entered the world penniless and will leave it penniless, if we have bread on the table and shoes on our feet, that’s enough.

And bread on the table we did have, Mike's fresh out the oven sourdough, plus oranges from the garden, and a pan full of eggs with bits of bacon, peppers, wild asparagus and a few nettles.

This verse reminds me of something I used to say about living with the very poor in NE Brazil - would you rather be given loads of money, or be given the gift of realizing you didn't need loads of money to be happy? What they gave us was the latter, and I will be forever grateful. 

More gratefuls:
- Zilda, especially, one of those people, and one of my big heroes, here she is in her kitchen when we last visited
- getting stuff done to leave our place, like taking all our plants in pots to Delfina, who will water them for us
- finishing Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens. What a brilliant, beautifully written story, about a young girl, Kya, abandoned by her family and despised by the local community (for being poor, basically), growing up in the North Carolina marshes. Highly recommended, but be prepared to lose sleep to finish it, not easy to put down.