John 6:5. “When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him,
Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’”
Do the math: one loaf for every thousand people and half a fish for every one thousand two hundred fifty people. “Six month’s wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.”
We have probably all been in situations that demanded more of us than we had or could produce. We did the math, got the answer, and found we were short. Despite the math, the correct answer to any question, regardless of subject matter, isn’t about the quantity of our resources but rather about the quality of our seeing and living.
Philip and Andrew have the math right, but they fail the test. I wonder if that’s often true for us, if we sometimes forget that spiritual hunger cannot be fed by a loaf of store-bought bread, that life is not an equation to be reconciled to the last digit, and that spiritual problems are not solved by fancy administrative techniques. When I forget the quality of the life I see around me and get sucked into quantifying my life, I always seem to be hungry.
*Originally written for and published by Forward Day by Day.
Interrupting the Silence 