You should see the things my son creates with Lego. Some of the creations are unique originals, but most of them are designed sets. We have Star Wars sets, Spiderman sets, Superman sets, NASA sets. You name something a 9-year-old boy would like, he probably has been given a Lego set for it by a doting grandparent because of a birthday, Christmas Day, or Thursday.
Each set is pretty intricate. There are all sorts of bricks and pieces from little tiny ones to big flat pieces to the classic 2 x 6 brick. They all come together to make ships, or cars, or buildings. You name it, Lego can build it. You may look at the pieces before you put everything together and imagine the tiniest pieces are inconsequential compared to the large ones. But as you begin snapping pieces together, you realize that leaving out even one tiny piece throws the whole project off. It just won’t work… or at least not in the way it was meant to work.
Jesus feeding the 5,000 is found in every gospel, but John has a unique detail we’ll discover below:
5 Jesus looked up and saw the large crowd coming toward him. He asked Philip, “Where will we buy food to feed these people?” 6 Jesus said this to test him, for he already knew what he was going to do.
7 Philip replied, “More than a half year’s salary[a] worth of food wouldn’t be enough for each person to have even a little bit.”
8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said, 9 “A youth here has five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that for a crowd like this?”
John 6:5-9 [CEB]
In John, it isn’t the disciples who have the food. It is a youth. A youth offers up 5 loaves and 2 fish. Enough to feed a family maybe, but seemingly insignificant when you put it up against the thousands in the crowd. You might imagine they would keep this small offering to themselves, but they did not and Jesus was able to do amazing things with it.
We might look at others and think, “I can’t give as much as they can. Why give at all? What good will my little bit do? I’ll let them take care of all the others and I’ll just take care of my own.” But as it turns out with Lego sets and Kingdom visions, we need the big pieces AND the small pieces. Every piece is important, and the outcome won’t be the same without every one of them.
I don’t understand how the littlest pieces make some of the biggest differences in my son’s intricate Lego sets. I don’t understand how Jesus turned a youth’s offering into enough to feed thousands. I don’t understand how my seemingly small offering will make much of a difference in our church, community, or, much less, the world. But I am invited not to understand. I am invited to participate by offering what I have no matter how small.
Prayer: God of abundance, what I have doesn’t seem that much to me, but I offer it to you anyway. May my giving of it make it more significant. Amen.
Written By: Nick Scott