Mark 8:1-13; See the Need

It is intriguing that Jesus does not actually ask the apostles to feed this crowd. He simply points out the need. Then they begin to figure out how to respond.

So often in life God seems to operate this way. He simply presents needs to us. There are times, I must confess, that I am frustrated with others around me who can stroll by those needs without seeing a thing. How can they be so blind? How can they be so content in their blindness?

Yet the real difficulty comes in responding to any presented need. Like this story I often feel that what I have to work with is laughingly insufficient. Yet in this story the insufficient was made sufficient through Jesus' touch. They key will be to make myself remember that the next time I see a student who needs personal mentoring, a body of believers with no direction, a group stuck in confusion, etc.

To be honest the most lacking resources seem to be time and energy. In other words, there is an insufficient amount of me. Therefore the issue becomes do I believe that Jesus can touch and multiply me to meet the needs. Obviously I mentally assent to the concept and believe it in my heart. But will I default to that belief the next time I see a need?

Scraps; Luke 9:10-17

I wonder how you feel when God looks at you and says "feed these 5000 people now"? Surely the apostles did the same thing I would have done, i.e., look for whatever was available. The great conclusion was five loaves and two fish. Obviously these were not five pound bass either. The put all their resources together and had an embarrassing amount of resources to bring before God.

The point, however, was that they brought them to God. Jesus took what they had and did more than they had imagined.

Then there were the baskets. As if to put an exclamation point at the end of the lesson, Jesus sent them to pick up the leftovers. That there would be leftovers from the distribution of five loaves and two fish seems an absurd concept to add to an already unimaginable situation. Yet he ends the story demonstrating that God's scraps were more than mankind's resources.

So often I've read this and thought of how the apostles lacked faith. Maybe they had faith but lacked vision or imagination. I wonder what God could do with my pitiful resources if I could only see through his eyes?