The Last Box from the Old Address

When Maria Dominguez finally closed on her first house in Garland, Texas, she kept a cardboard box in the hallway closet for eleven months. It held canned soup, ramen packets, and a jar of peanut butter — the same emergency rations she had stockpiled during six years of apartment living, when a single missed paycheck meant choosing between groceries and rent. Her daughter found it one Saturday morning and asked why they still had it. Maria stood in the kitchen of a home she owned, with a garden out back already producing tomatoes, and realized she had been living like someone who might lose everything at any moment.

That afternoon, she donated every item in the box to her church's food pantry.

This is the moment Israel faces in Joshua 5. For forty years, they woke each morning to gather manna — miraculous, yes, but also the bread of wandering, the food of people who had no land to call their own. When they finally ate the produce of Canaan — unleavened cakes and roasted grain grown from their own soil — the manna stopped. God was not abandoning them. He was promoting them. The reproach of Egypt, that old identity of slavery and displacement, was rolled away at Gilgal.

Sometimes the hardest part of entering a new season is releasing the survival habits of the old one. The Almighty does not ask us to forget His faithfulness in the wilderness. He asks us to trust that His provision in the promised land will be just as sure — even when it looks completely different.