How easy it is to cluck and chatter about inequity and injustice and poverty and hunger. Nowadays we can express our outrage or commitment by liking or sharing social media posts, or signing online petitions. It’s not so hard to name the problems of this world, or even the solutions – as long as they are things other people ought to do.
Jesus’ disciples were quick to discern a disaster in the making – a crowd growing very hungry, with no food on hand, and to propose a common sense solution – send them home before tempers fray. But Jesus had another idea:
When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’
This exchange between Jesus and his followers has played out in thousands of church meetings. Jesus says, “You feed them, you clothe them, you protect them, you stand up for them,” and we say, “How? It’s too much. We're too small. We don’t have it. Where would we get it?” We shut down conversations about helping the hungry, the homeless, the hurting with the same reasoning – if we can’t help them all, why bother? We don’t have enough.
Jesus doesn’t argue with his disciples. He just says, “Go and see. Assess it. What do you really have?” And they come back with an answer that, on the face of it, just proves their point: Not Enough. What the heck can we do with five loaves of bread and two fish in the face of this need?” One answer? A lot more than you could do with the nothing you thought you had a minute ago!
I do believe God supernaturally multiplies our offerings, as this story goes on to demonstrate. But even if that wasn’t the case, when we put our “not enoughs” together, they compound like interest. The time we put in builds momentum when joined by other people’s time. The money we give can accomplish much more in aggregate than our own small donations do. The ideas we bring catalyze other people’s creativity to find solutions.
Instead of starting from needs we think we should address, and asking whether we have enough to make a difference, maybe our starting question should be, What do we have in abundance? What do we have so much of, we can share it? It might be friends, it might be education, it might be space in our buildings, it might be zucchini. Whatever it is, if we identify our abundance, it won’t take too much work to find out where it can make a difference.
The only thing we’re not allowed to say as followers of Christ is, “Oh well, it’s such a shame that people are starving while we die of obesity-related disease and throw away 40% of our food.” We just start where we start, offering what we have, and invite others to join us. Pretty soon we’ll find multitudes being fed on our Not Enough.
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