Even if you’ve never read a word of the Bible, you probably could name at least one biblical example of provision lasting much longer or stretching much further than it should have. Think about it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You might have thought of the story of the loaves and the fishes (there are several of them actually), different times when Christ took a little bread and fish and turned it into enough to feed the Staples Center and send everyone home with a doggy bag. Or the time God made a day’s worth of lamp oil last longer than humanly possible, which is remembered each year for nine days of Hanukkah. And if you’re fond of a good wedding reception, you might have recalled Jesus’ first miracle, where he turned water into an endless stream of the “finest wine,” amazing and delighting the guests and kicking off, at his mother’s urging, the beginning of the end. The point is this: God knows how to make stuff last. But who can really afford to believe it? Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we give up our earthly to-do lists and start asking how He—whoever he is exactly— thinks we should spend our days and we even learn to pray and we even start to hear him and then suddenly the worst happens: we run out of money. Or food. Or time. And we’ve got no back up plan. No cushion. Not even a well-connected friend to pull us back up when we fall.
It is this fear that drives us to drive our kids to aim for the big numbers, the sort of SAT scores that’ll ensure they’ll never run out of anything—ever. This is our legacy to them: we made sure they jumped so high that the world could never fail to pay them enough to make them feel safe and secure all the rest of their days. But for all the mathematical certainty of that equation, we don’t feel sure at all. (Elijah & the SAT, p. 55)
Heather Choate Davis 