Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Webb

A prayer that starts in the stomach and ends in surrender is already doing something sly. Mary Webb asks God first for “good digestion” and only then for “something to digest,” a sequencing that elevates bodily ease over moral grandeur. It’s not gluttony so much as a realist’s theology: hunger is ordinary, digestion is the difference between comfort and misery, and a pious life is inseparable from the mechanics of being alive.

The real bite is in the pivot: “but where and how that something comes I leave to Thee.” Webb doesn’t demand provision, only the capacity to make use of whatever arrives. That’s humility with a backbone. In an era when English rural life was still shadowed by scarcity, illness, and the constant arithmetic of meals, this reads like a commonsense creed: don’t pray for luxury, pray for resilience. The line “who knoweth best” carries a faint, almost wry acknowledgement that the distribution of “something” is not fair, not transparent, and often not kind. Faith here isn’t a triumphant claim; it’s a coping strategy that refuses melodrama.

As a novelist of the Shropshire countryside, Webb understood how bodies anchor story: weather, labor, appetite, and deprivation shape character more reliably than lofty ideals. This quote compresses that worldview into a domestic liturgy. It sanctifies the everyday while admitting, with clear-eyed tenderness, how little control we truly have over the next mouthful.