And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium. And the people went about, and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil. And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell [with] it.
Manna was a miracle, right? It's how the Lord kept hundreds of thousands of essentially nomadic people alive in the wilderness for 40 years. Every day (except the Sabbath), this manna fell with the dew in the early morning. But the children of Israel could not just pick it up and eat it straight from the ground whenever they felt hungry. This amazing miracle required the people to get up early in the morning to gather it (before the heat of the sun melted it), then grind it or beat it, and finally bake it - before they could eat it.
I imagine that probably the first few times they attempted to prepare manna for eating, it turned out less than ideal. Maybe first they tried it raw, but discovered it gave them a stomach ache. Maybe then they boiled it, but that gave it a weird consistency they didn't enjoy. Maybe then they tried something else, and something else, until eventually they figured out how to make manna into a meal that could be enjoyed (or at least tolerated after the thousandth time that year) without any unfortunate side effects.
Perhaps sometimes life's miracles are like manna. God loves us enough to bless us not with the finished product, but with the raw materials. Our job is to find and gather the raw materials, and then figure out how to turn them into something that meets our needs. The cool part of this is that it allows us to use our agency and our creative power - both gifts from that same loving God - to aid Him in blessing us.
I feel like I should share an example so that this isn't just an esoteric concept... so. Here's my best attempt. As an LDS mid-single woman, I believe that any time two people over 30 decide to get married, it's a miracle. I pray for this kind of miracle every once in a while, for myself or for my dearest friends. It occurred to me today that perhaps one of Father's answers to these prayers is to provide opportunities to attend a mid-singles ward. These opportunities are only raw materials, so we need to use our agency and creative abilities to find and cultivate relationships that lead to dating and marriage. Sometimes we are going to try a thing that only results in a stomach ache. Sometimes the end result won't be exactly what we enjoy. But, like the daily gathering and preparation of manna, we can keep making efforts and trying different things until we find the thing that works.
And when it does, that will make us all the more grateful for the miracle, because we participated in the creating of it.
