I WONDER whether you can tell what those two women are doing who sit opposite each other in the picture? Yes, you are quite right; they are not English women, we can tell that by their dress; and they are grinding. But what are they grinding? Not corn from those fields, bright with scarlet poppies, through which you walked last summer, but corn which once waved in the breeze which blows over the yellow cornfields of Judea.
And when they have ground the corn, will they make it into bread?
Yes; into loaves of bread very much like those five loaves with which our Lord fed the five thousand tired, hungry people, as they sat on the green grass and the disciples waited upon them, so many years ago.
But what a strange mill that is! Yes; very strange to our eyes, for although we have seen windmills, with their great sails turning slowly round, showing black against the red evening sky, and watermills where the pretty, clear stream seems to go laughing along its journey as it falls in pearly spray over the mossy edges of the old wheel which it keeps constantly turning, we have never seen such a mill as this.
Yet English children in days gone by saw just such mills at work, and heard the sound of the great millstones as they crushed the corn, and Syrian children today know them well. This plan of crushing corn between heavy millstones was known in very early times, for while horses and dogs have not the sort of sense which would teach them to prepare food for themselves, God has given men knowledge, so that they not only plow and sow and reap, but grind the corn which God makes to grow for them, so as to turn it into wholesome food for themselves and their children.
You are so accustomed to have all you want provided for you, that I daresay you never think what a wonderful thing it is that each morning as you come downstairs there is bread, daily bread, ready for you.
I once sat at a breakfast table on which there was plenty of porridge and milk, and bread and butter, and nice hot coffee, but there was something that was not there. Can you guess what it was?
Well, I must tell you; it was the sweet herb called content. One of the children began to fret, because his piece of bread was cut too thick, and had not enough butter upon it; and another said he did not like his porridge, and wished he might have bread and milk instead. They did not stop to think that they had no right to anything, helpless little creatures that they were, who could not find food For themselves half so well as the brave little robins; if God, who takes care of the birds, had not taken care of those children, they would, indeed, have been badly off. Surely it is very sad to grumble and be discontented with what God gives us. If one of the children who sat on the grass that day, long ago, when the five thousand were fed, had held up his piece of bread and said, perhaps to the Apostle Peter, “I don’t like this piece, let me have another,” how ungrateful that child would have been!
Such a child would not have been pleasing to the Lord Jesus, who gave thanks before He gave the bread to the disciples to hand round to the people, nor is a discontented child, who finds fault with the food God has given us, pleasing to Him now.