A handful of bread...

So, another Orphan Sunday has come and gone. I showed some pictures, a touching video, and talked about the numbers again. I used the “147 million orphans” number. 147 million is a huge number. 147,000,000 is a lot of zeroes. I saw one analogy that said if you lined the world’s orphans up side-by-side and drive past them in a car, it would take so many weeks to drive past them all. It is an overwhelming number. One person, one family, one church (even a mega-church) can fix 147 million. It is like trying to hold a gallon of water in your hands, you just cannot do it.

            In Mark 6:33-44 there is a process went like this:

·      Jesus told the Disciples to feed the overwhelmingly large crowd (well over 5000 people)

·      The Disciples recognized the impossibility of such a task and were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

·      One of them, Andrew, found 5 loaves of bread (think dinner rolls) and 2 fish (think little pan fish no bigger than your hand) that a boy had brought as his sack lunch for the day (poor kid, he just had his lunch and probably dinner snatched up by a bunch of ruffian disciples).

·      Jesus tells them to bring what they have found.

·      Jesus divides up the crowd.

·      Jesus blesses the loaves and fish.

·      Jesus starts handing the Disciples pieces of the loaves and fish to distribute among the people.

·      They have enough to feed everyone in the crowd and gather up 12 baskets of leftovers.

           Don’t miss this: Jesus divided up the labor and the resources across the disciples. Each was given only as much as they could carry, clearly not enough to feed everyone at once. Jesus gave them just enough to fit in their hands. He gave them only what they could carry and sent them off to serve. He didn’t make a bunch and divide it up into baskets, or make 5000 individually packaged combo meals, or put it in “family packs”. He gave each Disciple a handful to serve to the people. When they ran out of bread and fish, they had to go back to Jesus for more. Jesus “kept giving” (vs 41) until “everyone was satisfied” (vs 42). Jesus even provided more than was needed.

           So how do I deal with 147 million children? I don’t need to. I can deal with two, or five, or ten, or twenty. I can only be faithful to use the handful of resources He has given me to care for and serve the two or five or ten or twenty in my group. I can only give it all away and rely on Him to give more.