Our Daily Bread
I don’t agree with Our Daily Bread about everything. Maybe not even most things. There are places theologically where we part ways and I won’t pretend otherwise. I’ve spent years doing work that puts me in tension with institutions…religious and secular alike…that seem more committed to their own comfort than to the people suffering inside them. Our Daily Bread is not exempt from my scrutiny.
For those who don’t know it: Our Daily Bread is a small devotional published by a Christian ministry out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has been in print since 1956. Each entry is brief…a scripture, a reflection, a prayer…designed to be read in just a few minutes. It is distributed widely, including inside prisons, often at no cost to the person receiving it. Millions of people around the world read it every day. It is about as unflashy as Christian publishing gets. It just shows up, day after day and tries to point people toward God. You cannot miss these little booklets in evangelical spaces.
But I need to tell you something I cannot get around, no matter how I try.
The Man Our Daily Bread Found
Dusty Spencer knows God. Really knows God. A lot of that is because of Our Daily Bread.
Dusty is a Florida death row inmate…on June 25, he is scheduled to be an executed one. In that time, in that place, where the walls close in and the years blur together and the system does everything it can to convince a man he is nothing…that little devotional kept showing up. Day after day. Page after page. Most things that find you on death row want something from you. Our Daily Bread just gave. It kept giving. Somewhere in all those readings, across all those years, a man found his way to something real. Not religion as performance. Not faith as survival strategy. An actual, living encounter with the God he now trusts with everything…including what is coming.
I am his spiritual advisor. I have sat with Dusty. I have prayed with him. I have held space with him in places most people will never go and don’t want to imagine. I have watched what God has done in him with my own eyes. I can tell you without hesitation, without qualification, without any theological asterisk attached: the fruit is real. The transformation is real. The man I know is not the man the state of Florida wants to kill on June 25. He is someone who has been changed by grace and anyone willing to sit with him for five minutes would know it.
What Grace Does
It is a strange and humbling thing to watch a devotional you have complicated feelings about do something profound in someone you love. That is not a knock on me and it is not a knock on Our Daily Bread. It is just the grace of God doing what grace does…moving through whatever vessels it will, unbothered by our arguments, unimpressed by our divisions, uninterested in waiting for us to get our theology sorted out before it gets to work.
That is actually the thing I want us to sit with today. Because we live in a moment where it feels nearly impossible to find ground that holds across our differences. The divides are real. The disagreements are serious. I am not asking anyone to paper over them. But Dusty Spencer is a man whose life testifies to something that should unite every single person who claims to care about human dignity, about redemption, about what it means to be changed: people can be transformed. It happens. It is happening. Sometimes the instrument of that transformation is a little devotional that some of us have complicated feelings about and the correct response to that is gratitude, not gatekeeping.
The state of Florida is prepared to end Dusty’s life on June 25. He will face that…is facing that…with a peace I have rarely witnessed in anyone, anywhere. A peace built over decades through small daily encounters with a God he met, in part, through Our Daily Bread.
Hold Him
I am grateful for Dusty, for who he is and who he has become. Grateful for whoever paid to send Our Daily Bread to him…some donor, somewhere, who will likely never know what that subscription did and who probably could never have imagined that someone like me would be the one with him here at the end. Grateful for everyone whose hands have carried him…known and unknown, agreed with and disagreed with…to the place where he stands now. I am asking you to hold him. Pray for him if that is your language. Carry him if it isn’t. Let the fact of his life and his transformation mean something to you, whatever your tradition, whatever your theology, whatever your complicated feelings about the institutions that have shaped either of you.
His name is Dusty Spencer. He is my friend. He is scheduled to be executed on June 25.
And he knows that God is with him…due at least in part to the witness of Our Daily Bread.
Sign the petition to ask Governor DeSantis to stop the execution: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stay-the-execution-of-dusty-ray-spencer
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In