Daily Bread and American Dream Bread

Ah, the American Dream.

A good job, a spacious home, a white picket fence, a golden retriever, and a new-to-you Honda Odyssey. You can picture the Instagram account, right? If you’re new to Instagram, here’s what you need to know: Instagram is a photo-editing app that many people use on their phones so they can project beautifully edited and filtered photos of the following:

1. Green smoothies in a mason jar (2 c leafy greens, 2 c water or almond milk, 3 c ripe fruit)
2. Organic foodstuffs, like apples, artfully arranged in a hand-thrown ceramic bowl
3. Selfies at the Mumford & Sons concert
4. Kids running through a sprinkler, ducking under drops of water, laughing uproariously 

Here’s my latest Instagram:

Looks pretty good, right? My life must be perfect! I must be a great parent and my kids look like they never fight and they always eat their vegetables.

But here’s the problem with Instagram, and with the American Dream generally: its lifestyle is entirely antithetical to the lifestyle that Christ expects. You know what doesn’t look great on Instagram? Daily bread. Humility. Justice. Sacrifice. Self-control.

The world tells you to rise to your highest level of competence—to achieve to your highest potential.

Christ tells you to die to yourself—to take up your cross and deny yourself.

Now, I don’t mean to mislead you. I use Instagram like so many of you, and I think that if Jesus were living among us, then he would use probably use Instagram too. But what does it look like to project Daily Bread rather than American Dream Bread?

Well, I think it looks a lot like private acts of faithfulness and trust. It looks like Bible reading and prayer and hard conversations with people we love. It looks like responsible living. It looks like practicing self-control with our finances, with our words, with our dinner choices, and with our time. Notice that the life of Christ has many of the same elements present in the American dream—money, friends, conversation, food, pleasure—just on an entirely different scale. It’s measured and valued differently.

If you’re like me, then you might have a hard time getting out of your own way. It’s hard to trust that God will “show up” when you feel that you have all the tools to accomplish your goals on your own. It’s hard to step aside and let God control your life when it seems that you can do a pretty good job of controlling it by yourself. But if you’re like me, then you also know that you might have what you want, but you probably don’t have what you need: Daily Bread, humility, justice, sacrifice, and self-control.