I haven’t seen one of my neighbors in a while. And so when I met him changing a flat tire of his truck at the parking lot this morning, we had a chance to catch up on what has been going on for the last few months.

Well, my neighbor’s name is Joel and he has been in Narok town for a while. Narok is a farming town located some 2 hours drive from Nairobi. Narok is in the heart of the wheat producing region of Kenya, and I hear that it is dry and dusty. Apparently, it can be a shrewd business decision for anyone to lease land in which to farm wheat, and make a handsome profit from the venture. That is what Joel is currently doing.

I remember him telling me about it a few years ago. At that time, it was just an idea that he way toying around with. Talking with him today, it is easy to tell that experience has a way of bolstering the words that come from a man’s mouth. Joel now talks with the authority of a seasoned wheat farmer, complete with a dusty, weather beaten, all terrain truck to prove it.

Most of the small details about wheat farming that he mentioned with so much excitement I cannot remember. And as I said goodbye to Joel and went ahead to the shop to buy some breakfast, I wondered if this is a business I should consider getting into. But them I remembered that Joel told me that wheat season – from preparing the land for planting to harvesting – lasts a whole year. And that is when I saw the bread that I was holding absent mindedly, and realized that it has been a whole year in the making!

It has taken a whole year – and all those things that Joel informed me that go into wheat farming – for the bread I was about to eat to land on my table. And as I went ahead to have my breakfast, it occurred to me that each time that we pray the simply line of the Lord’s prayer; “Give us this day our daily bread…” we usually are asking for instant outcomes that usually require tremendous input from individuals like Joel and many other people for hundreds of days.

Most people are familiar with delayed prayers. Delayed prayers are the number one reason why people come out waving placards and protesting loudly (to anyone who will care to listen) about God’s unfairness. But what if the answer to our prayer is delayed because there were some unforeseen circumstances that Joel and his partners encountered in the current season, and they have to patiently wait until the next season before they can get a harvest? Or perhaps there is someone else who needs the bread as a matter of life and death and got preference over us? Or perhaps we took such a small thing as a loaf of bread for granted and forgot to give thanks?

Well, who knows? As I said, most of the details that Joel mentioned about wheat farming are still vague to me.

A friend once noted that when our parents were much younger, it was very easy for a person to acquire land within the relatively undeveloped Nairobi town back then. The observation came up during a conversation in which we were complaining about the high cost of office space within the city centre. My friend said, “If our fathers had acquired land in the city in the 60s and 70s, we would now be enjoying the benefits that the children of the men with vision now enjoy.” We both kept quite as we imagined the benefits that children of visionaries enjoy. But before long, my friend intruded into the daydreams by saying, “You know what? 20 years from now, our children will be having this conversation if we fail to acquire that which will be valuable to them then.”

Looking back at that conversation, I often wonder what it is that will be of value in 20 year’s time. That thing is currently readily available, and as a result has a very low value attached to it – just like land in the city was readily available, and hence had much lower value in the 60s and 70s than in has now. But I suppose the challenge is to identify that thing and invest in it now. But given that people have the tendency of coveting the thing that seems overpriced at any particular moment, it might seem kind of foolish for a person to get his or her eyes from the ball and run after ‘useless’ things: maybe as ridiculous as Noah might have looked when he spent a good 100 years of his life constructing a boat in the desert.

I suppose the consolation here is that that ‘useless’ thing that you or I spend so much time doing today, might just be that which will give our lives work meaning in years to come and perhaps that which our children will thank us for in 20 years time.