Posted on: 23rd October 2025

As my wife will tell you…I am a bread monster. If it was up to me then my breakfast, lunch and dinner would be a couple of slices of toast or a sandwich; that’s all I really need. Thankfully (I think) my wife has a different ideas about the balance of my diet and so my bread fixation is tempered by some healthier alternatives. This morning I led an assembly at a primary school in Morley and I asked the children what was their favourite kind of bread. The answers were delightfully cosmopolitan… ‘baguette, sourdough, nan, white, brown.’ The variety of breads we are blessed with in modern life are a lightyear away from the situation that existed in Britain between 1942 and 1956. For those fourteen years the only bread available was ‘the national loaf.’ The loaf was developed by Dr Roland Gordon Booth of the Federation of Bakers to be a bread that was nutritious yet readily made using the only ingredients available due to rationing. Given that the nations favourite loaf before the war was white bread, the wholemeal loaf was universally disliked as heavy and unappealing and provoked criticism even from Eleanor Roosevelt, the American First Lady. After visiting Buckingham Palace in 1942, she recalled noted that "We were served on gold and silver plates, but our bread was the same kind of war bread every other family had to eat." 

The national loaf was not the bread people wanted…but it was the bread they needed. As we continue through the harvest season and into Autum, that sense seems to sum up for me what this season of thanksgiving is about, it is not about our wants and desires, but giving thanks that God provides what we need. Last year at the Crypt we were blessed to receive a donation of five trays of avocados. Now, it has to be said, it wasn’t particularly high on our list of ideal donations for feeding those who come through our doors at lunchtimes…to be honest it wasn’t what we wanted. Yet as our Head Chef looked upon the mountain of ripe avocados, he discovered the answer to what we needed. We needed a pudding that day and the shelves were bare. So with a hefty amount of icing sugar the avocados became ice cream…and jolly lovely it was too.

May we too as we view God's generous provision this harvest find ourselves giving thanks for the miracle that God provides what we need...not always what we want...but certainly what we need.