I Wanted More Than Daily Bread

Talking honestly about money

November 4, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung

So… there is a particular kind of lesson that only ever arrives late.

I once called a sermon series “Letters I Wish I’d Read Sooner.” Honestly, I almost called it: “Lessons I Wish I’d Learned Before Life Kicked My Butt.”

Because isn’t that how life goes? You go through something hard, and only afterward you think, “Why didn’t anyone warn me about this sooner?”

Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had told you before marriage, before kids, before that job you thought was your dream just how much it would stretch you, test you, and change you?

Yeah. Lessons we all wish we’d learned sooner.

Here is mine.

I tell my son about saving, pension plan and good financial habits. Because no one ever told me how important pensions and retirement planning really are.

Back then, I figured, “Well, I’m a minister. God will provide.”

And yes, God does provide… but I’ll be honest, I wanted more than daily bread.

Would’ve been nice to learn that sooner.

I want to slow down on that, because it took me a long time to be able to say it out loud, and I notice I still want to soften it.

God will provide was not a joke and it was not naïve. It was the whole financial plan, it was widely shared, and nobody in my world thought it strange. Money was slightly worldly. Planning for money was slightly faithless. A minister who talked about his pension was a minister whose priorities had drifted.

And I have to say the next part carefully, because it matters: the provision came. I have never gone hungry. My children were fed and clothed and educated. There was a roof over us every single year, and some of those years I do not know how, and I have never had the nerve to call it my own competence.

Daily bread was promised. Daily bread is exactly, precisely what arrived. Every day, for forty years.

The trouble is the sentence that follows.

I wanted more than daily bread.

It sounds ungrateful, and I am not ungrateful. It sounds like a man complaining about terms he accepted freely with his eyes open, and perhaps it is. But it is true, and I suspect it is true for a great many people in my line of work who will not say so.

What I wanted was to stop calculating. To help my children without doing arithmetic first. To look at the years ahead and feel something other than a low, steady arithmetic running underneath everything; at a good dinner, on a holiday, even while telling somebody else not to worry, because God will provide.

Daily bread is enough to live on. It is not enough to stop counting.

There is a quiet piety about money that harms the very people it is supposed to protect. Nobody ever sat me down and said: the God who provides is not opposed to a pension plan. The plan may be one of the ways the providing arrives. Declining to enroll is not a spiritual achievement.

It would have sounded almost crude in a spiritual room. I could have heard it anyway.

So, I tell it to my son about pension plan and retirement. Whether he listens or not, I keep saying it anyway. Start now. Put it somewhere you cannot reach.

He may not act on it this year, or next year. But one day he is going to be standing in a kitchen doing the arithmetic himself, and a sentence his father said to him a long time ago is going to be sitting there waiting for him.

Which is more than there was for me.

Daily bread has come every day of my life. I am grateful, and I am still counting.

I have stopped trying to make one of those cancel the other.

Richard