So many times people fall into the trap of comparing themselves to other people. When they look at the impact they seem to have on the world, some people feel as if they don’t measure up.
Is this you?
Today I want to tell you a story from the Bible. If you don’t believe in Jesus this story will still have some application to your life.
The Bible is divided into 2 sections; one is the Old Testament and one is the New Testament. In essence, the Old Testament was written in the time before Jesus was born. The New Testament was written from the time of the birth of Jesus and the beginning of the Christian faith. The 1st four books of the New Testament are called the gospels. They are written accounts of when Jesus was here on earth written by 4 different people.
The only story that is in all 4 gospels is the story of where Jesus was with his disciples and there was a huge crowd following him because he had been healing people and doing all kinds of miracles. Jesus looks up at one of his disciples and says “Where are we going to get food to feed all of these people?” One of them says “ We would need almost a year’s salary to feed them all.” Another one says “I found this boy, and he has some bread and a couple of fish, but this is not going feed many people.
Jesus looked up and said, “Make the people sit down” He prays over the food then starts distributing the food. As he was handing the food out there was always enough. Once all 5000 people were feed, there was still some leftover.
So many times we look at the actual miracle itself, of Jesus taking a kid’s lunch and feeding five thousand people. The other way we look at this story is we focus on the boy who willingly offered his lunch to Jesus so he could help others. I want to take a look at someone else, someone that seems to never get mentioned. I was in church nine months before I was born and I have never heard a preacher or speaker talk about or mention the mom of this story.
This is the mom that fixed that little boy’s lunch that day. I imagine that mom kneading the dough with work-worn hands, carefully wrapping the fresh loaves and fish in a cloth, and handing the bundle to the boy with a kiss on his cheek. To her, these must have seemed such small, ordinary tasks. How could she have anticipated that the meal she had packed for her son that day would have such eternal significance? She couldn’t have know that the ordinary, mundane lunch she made her kid would be one of the most talked about miracles in the history of planet earth.
This reminded me of the many ways that God takes our small efforts and uses them to feed people physically, emotionally, and spiritually. So when I feel that I should be doing bigger things with my life, I remind myself of the loaves and fishes. It is great to have goals and aspirations and success. God wants us to have those things. But always remember your job. My job is to do the tasks in front of me. God’s job — God’s delight — is to use them to feed the world.
QUESTION: What is one daily task you do that will have new meaning after reading this post?
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