Last year I grossed about $3,000 less than the Alaska poverty line and spent nearly three-fourths of what I did earn on rent for an apartment that’s close to the cheapest Anchorage offers. Car upkeep—vital to my freelance work as a writer and church pianist—took roughly another 20 percent of my income. You do the math. As the Porter’s Gate song “Daily Bread” goes, I’m “stretching pennies into dimes.”
Ironically, I’m probably one of the wealthier people at my church. Unlike many of them, I have a car, though it’s 34 years old and needs at least $2,000 in repairs for which I’m figuring out how to pay. The affordability crisis raises hard questions for Christians: Can I still afford to tithe or share with others? Can I trust God to provide today’s food, or should I put my groceries on a credit card? Some in my church may not even have that option.
In college through my early 20s, I took the credit card route. (Lifeway Research suggests I’m not alone. Though reasons for debt vary, Christians owe similar amounts to nonbelievers.) Then, in the tight season that yielded my first book, Sexless in the City, God helped me deal with the nearly $50,000 I owed: some for education but most from living beyond my means. That paved the way to getting debt free by 34, starting to save, and eventually taking the financial risk that got me here.
Eight years ago, I quit my job to research a book on singleness in the global church. I had no publisher, just a strong and scary sense of divine invitation to take the risk. Funding the roughly 18 months of international fieldwork for Solo Planet used most of the modest sum I’d originally meant for a house down payment. Week after week on the road, God provided church contacts, housing, and more. Yet during interviews with some of the poorest people I talked to, I struggled to believe their praise of God. Why did they think so highly of him when he let them lead such hard lives?
I interviewed nearly 350 people on the trip and visited 25 countries in the first seven months, so interviews focused on singleness and rarely went longer than an hour or at most two. But I imagine if I’d had time to build relationships and have wider-ranging conversations, I’d have heard more stories like what I’ve come to call my miracle of food.
About two years after I settled in Anchorage to turn my fieldwork into a book, a single mom with a disability asked for food in a small, mostly inactive Facebook group I’d joined. I was earning a few thousand dollars more per year then, but my net income felt like just barely enough for tithe and a fairly frugal existence. Still, I knew I had enough to assemble a bag of groceries from my pantry.
I’ve learned to be careful claiming isolated “promise” verses will always apply to me. But what’s followed my small sacrifice that day sure seems to bear out Malachi 3:10: “‘Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.’”
Later that day, I made the first of many, many food pickups through my Buy Nothing group. A lady had lots of extra salmon, some with slight freezer burn, and wanted it gone that day. More and more food followed in the weeks and months to come: People were moving out of state, making room for fishing season, or changing their diets. (That first summer, roughly 40 pounds of salmon alone passed through my hands, some of it in excellent condition.) Others had bought something they didn’t like and didn’t want to bother returning it. Some didn’t like to use “expired” food. By the time I lost touch with the single mom in the Facebook group, I’d made nearly a dozen trips to her place, probably dropping off at least 100 pounds of food. I always ended up with some for myself too.
Then a local CSA-type produce business sought volunteers. In exchange, we got a box of food or its equivalent in credit—a little more than minimum wage in effective value. I quickly learned, though, that volunteers could also glean through the compost or shelves of “donation food” the business couldn’t sell. That extra benefit quickly became my greatest motivation to volunteer. At first, the owner just needed help with the extra volume from summer subscriptions. But maybe given my zeal for gleaning, she eventually started texting me when people called out sick or someone quit on short notice.
As I found new ways to use and share the food (like cooking a giant batch of soup for a nightly dinner that local churches provide for a women’s shelter), I gleaned more. I now regularly leave with a few boxes of food. It’s one of the biggest reasons I averaged about $33 per week on groceries the first half of last year. Bad spots or not, that gleaned produce has provided a huge blessing for me and many others with whom I’ve shared it.
Some time ago, a person then more familiar with material want than I was remarked that she looked forward to the day when her family had more money so they could be more generous with others. I wish I’d thought to ask her the kind of sharing she had in mind.
Two years ago, I visited some friends and found out they’d had a similar experience of God’s food provision. As we swapped stories, at one point I described this as a season of relative poverty. The husband challenged me. “Your life doesn’t sound poor,” he said.
And it’s true. God has provided such abundance through so many varied and creative means that my biggest food problem is not what or how to eat but how to use it up or store it all. I’m currently borrowing space in part of four other freezers, though most of that food is intended for others.
Sometimes I’m not sure whom God intends to bless. Does he pour this blessing on me? Or is it meant for the people with whom I get to share it, and I’m just fortunate some of it rubs off on me? Over the years, he’s provided a gallon of molasses when I suspected an iron deficiency. (Fieldwork gave me multiple parasites, which altered my digestion.) He has provided vitamin D supplements for a friend who had just run out of them and many cocoa tins for the same man, who loves chocolate. God has provided coconut milk, whole-wheat flour, tahini, teas I delighted in, many greens, and dozens of slightly bruised stone fruits that my friend and his son enjoyed.
A few weeks ago, I sat at my dining table on a Saturday, pondering the next day’s church-leader meeting. Upon joining the group, I made it a practice to cook soup for us since the afternoon meetings went long and it’s hard to think well when you’re hungry. My only rule was that I tried to use “free” food: something I’d gleaned, been given, or found in the hallway where my neighbors sometimes leave extras from their food-pantry boxes.
That Saturday, I didn’t have much beside a one-pound bag of rice—unopened—that’d I’d literally found in the street on a walk to pray. I was just asking God how I could cook for the next day when I thought to check the mail.
As I approached the wall of boxes, I saw the strewn household debris a moving neighbor had left for picking over. Few people had shown interest, so it took me a minute to recognize the new items: two grocery bags full of fresh, if somewhat withered, bell peppers and other veggies. Some took a little TLC to salvage, but I had more than enough to make what I called my “miracle soup.”
Friends who have followed God’s provision for me often comment on how much food waste I eliminate. One Holy Week, I cleaned out the stash of a caterer who’d died and left a closet full of food-pantry boxes I assume he accrued when COVID-19 lockdowns shut down his line of work. Nearly all the food was “expired,” but late on Good Friday, I borrowed a church kitchen to sort and research it all, making piles on several tables.
Once it was sorted, I saved two or three boxes for a friend, took a few things for myself, and put the rest out in my building, along with a printout of USDA expiration-date guidance. By Easter Monday, my neighbors had claimed nearly all of it.
Secular friends who’ve followed this journey sometimes seem sad that I can’t just always buy what I want when I want it. But I’ve come to love the ways God surprises me. One day I was literally on my way to Costco to buy items including eggs when a friend texted to offer me some of the food a pastor had recently given him—which included three dozen eggs. I feel loved and cared for when God provides in ways like that.
I don’t know what God’s provision for the hungry looks like in less-wealthy countries, but if he’s truly the same yesterday, today, and forever, then Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount advice about worry—given to a Jewish audience living under occupation—must apply across time and culture. Perhaps, as I once heard pastor Kyle Brooks say, it’s a problem not of God’s provision but of human distribution of those gifts.
During fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I asked two churches for help with my research: one in a very rich neighborhood, one with only an open-air shelter in which to meet. The rich church offered no help, but the other pastor went out of his way to aid me. He organized meetings with multiple churches and, at one point, even insisted I stay in his home’s only bedroom. (I insisted his visiting sister-in-law share the bed with me so they didn’t all sleep on the floor.) I’ve since become a regular supporter of Willium, who seems to get more gifts more consistently from foreigners than fellow Tanzanians with more wealth.
This and other situations I heard about raise hard questions about both God’s goodness and the best way for me to help (if at all). Sometimes I have a direct role to play in meeting either Willium’s need or that of a fellow church member. Other times I can only bring them to God in prayer and ask for God’s help discerning what he asks of me today. Big-picture questions matter—whether about injustice or my financial future—as Jesus’ wide-ranging teaching and parables show. But it’s also all too easy to get so focused on things we can’t control that we neglect the things we can. I wonder if that’s one of the Enemy’s favorite snares for us.
Despite nearly four years of these food miracles, I still often struggle with doubt. Between a recent 7.6 percent rent increase, the 30 percent or more surge in gas prices, a recent tax mess spanning several years, and the question of my car repairs, it’s easy to squander energy and time on worry. I’ve had enough success in freelance writing that this seems like what I’m supposed to keep pursuing. It’s just a very faith-stretching way to get by in life, compared to those years when I could easily trust in my salary and benefits more than in God.
But every time my doubts surge anew, I only have to open the fridge or the pantry to taste God’s abundant, creative, personal provision again. And when I eat my daily bread, I find it’s enough to trust God until the next meal.
Anna Broadway is the author of Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling and Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.
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