Did you know that snails can sleep for up to three years at a time if the weather doesn’t suit them? Snails need moisture to survive and so if the weather is too dry, they need to hunker down until a wetter day.

I feel like a snail sometimes. The climate around me can be arid and dry and quite frankly, that doesn’t always suit me. Perhaps the kids are complaining. Maybe the finances aren’t quite stretching to payday. Sometimes relationships are fraught and fractious. The latest report has bad news. Or I feel far from God and like He’s just out of reach. When life is forecasting a drought I can be tempted to hide away in my shell where no one can reach me – hidden until the weather shifts and I can emerge as if nothing happened.

And yet, that’s not real life. Unlike snails we can’t just hibernate for three years until circumstances suit us better. Life keeps going and we can’t check out until another day.

The Israelites knew something about living day to day in the dry and parched places. The place where, despite God’s presence with them, they felt far from Him – unseen and uncared for. For forty years they had to remain in the hot, dry wilderness. No hiding away until the climate changed for them. But God was with them, and he provided the exact type of precipitation they needed: Bread from heaven.

The Israelites needed to “gather a day’s portion every day,” (Ex 16:4) because when you’re living in the wilderness the way to survive is to gather provision daily. We are not snails. We can’t sign off for years at a time. We keep going. Day by day. And so we pray, “give us this day our daily bread” (Mtt 6:11) knowing that we need daily, life-giving sustenance.

When the weather of life isn’t to our liking, the life we need is the bread from heaven who “gives life to the world” (John 6:33). Jesus told us that He is the bread of life and that whoever comes to him will never hunger or thirst again.

So the next time the weather doesn’t suit, don’t hide away, hide in Jesus.