DAY 78 - BARLEY AND SARDINES
ZACH ATWOOD, YA EVENTS & OPERATIONS TEAM LEAD
“‘Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?’” John 6:9
I’m a super cheese-ball at heart and when it comes to sappy stories, I will bawl my eyes out. I go down the YouTube rabbit hole watching video after video of the military homecoming videos, the surprise gifts that had so much thought and care in them, or the videos of the little kids just being little bundles of love to anyone and everyone around them. Essentially anytime you have a puppy or cute kiddo in a heartwarming video (or even a commercial), I’m weeping.
I think one of the reasons why those videos get to me is that those videos show a sacrifice made by one person followed by a genuine loving response from the other person. E.g. a military dad sacrifices his time overseas and the daughter is surprised by his return at school (so many compilations on YouTube), the wife who creates a Build-A-Bear with a recording of her husband’s father who passed away last year (saw this one on the Tik-Tok and cried in my room for an hour), or a boy who goes to see his hero and literally gives him the last of his food (oh wait, that’s John 6 where Jesus feeds the five thousand).
So sorry for the cheesey biblical transition, but here we are…
In this story, we see a large crowd coming up to meet and hear from Jesus, but it’s around supper time and they certainly don’t have enough food to share with them all. Jesus sends out the boys to see what they can find, and they come back with one boy that has five loaves of bread and a couple of sardines. They are really limited in their party refreshments… but Jesus being Jesus goes on to take the sacrifice and feed the five thousand.
What I love about this story is that this little boy brings all that he has and offers it to Jesus as the food for the crowd. Now some theologians argue that this boy may have been part of Jesus’ traveling support crew and others claim that he was a random boy from the crowd, but nonetheless, I don’t think that this boy saw his rations as something unusable by God.
As we get older and become more cynical, we begin to think like the disciples and think “What can we do with so little? This isn’t even worth presenting…” We decide not to give to a cause because we feel our donation wouldn’t even make an impact. But this negative attitude oozes into more than just our tithing and giving heart; we hold off on doing something intentional for someone because it wouldn’t be all that we want it to be, we don’t want to call that friend because we only have 15 minutes and our time is more valuable doing something else right now, we don’t reach out to the non-believer friend because we’ve already talked to them four times about God and they aren’t interested.
What we see as a menial or non-important sacrifice is the exact thing that God wants to use to perform a miracle.
So Young Adults, let’s get a little introspective and see what we have been holding back on. Let’s give to that charity or send a gift card to the person you haven’t because you didn’t think it would help them. Set up that virtual group hangout even if it’s not the celebratory party you wanted it to be. Call that friend who needs discipleship in their season of life. Reach out to that agnostic/atheist friend again, because, who knows, maybe God will make that fifth conversation the one where your friend receives the miracle of salvation.