Food for Thought on a Sunday Morning

Jesus fed a large crowd with five barley loaves and two fish (John 6:1-21). Paul challenged the church in Ephesus to grow in faith and be be rooted and grounded in love (Ephesians 3:14-21). These words remind me to be rooted in something other than self-centeredness. They also challenge the notion of scarcity that permeates the church at large. In all four gospels the story is told about the miracle of feeding a multitude with five loaves and two fish. In the gospel of Matthew all who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. The gospel of Mark states that those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men. The disciples saw scarcity when they looked at what they had versus the size of the crowd. Jesus saw the abundance of God’s grace and love in the five loaves and two fish.

Thomas Merton had this to say about love which I believe ties into God’s abundance. The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. – No Man Is an Island, p. 168

Pardon the pun, but I believe that there is a lot of good food for thought in these words of Scripture and Thomas Merton as we look at how we as individuals and as a church move from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset as we seek to be the hands and feet of Christ.