Loaves & Fishes

Look, I don’t do the miracles. Like Thomas Jefferson and his pinking shears, I like to daintily discard the magic parts of the Bible. They mess with my groove.

'Uh, White Jesus, I assume
this is some kind of metaphor?'

So when it was time to read about loaves and fishes, I was ready to write it off and phone it in. Yeah, yeah, and everyone was fed.

Also, every time we get a new minister at church, and every time it is another white dude in his 20’s with millennial hair and hipster glasses (Rat calls them ‘minhipsters’) I expect him to be lame. But the new guy did alright with the old story this week. Pointing out that the loaves and fishes story is about ‘enough.’

It’s about thinking you don’t have enough, or you are not enough, and discovering, by the grace of god that it is enough. By starting from a point that is objectively measurably short of what you need and realizing that it contains all that you need.

It’s a crazy boardwalk magic trick the way once you start pulling from the resources of your actual self that things just keep unfolding, scarf after silken scarf. There is always enough of you for the thing, somehow, always. Even if the thing is more than you should have to face. Memere used to say, and Dad used to sort of doubtfully repeat that God never gives you anything you can’t handle. In the wrong hands, this translates roughly to ‘suck it up.’ But in actuality, it is true, not because all the sufferings of this world are or should be handleable, but because human capacity abounds.

But friends, you got to draw from the right well.

The well of what’s inside is infinitely deep, because if you go down far enough, you get to the source beyond the self, and the source is infinitely vast.

The little plastic cups that you have placed all around to appease the thirsty who come demanding-- those have bottoms.

You cannot draw infinitely from ‘nice,’ you cannot draw infinitely from ‘good,’ nor ‘selfless,’ nor ‘right.’ But you can draw infinitely from what’s true.

God did not grant you enough time to finish the project, or enough patience to keep from snapping, God did not grant you enough money to feed everyone or enough knowledge to solve everything. God did not grant you enough sense not to see that same mistake coming again. God did not grant you, maybe, enough milk for the pancakes. What you got is the enough behind those enoughs. Enough to do the thing. Enough to keep pedaling if you’re me, or keep running if you’re Jess or keep studying if you’re Yin Li. Enough to stop running if you're Rachel. Enough to stop helping if you're Andrew. Enough to stop being good if you're Darin.

What you got is enough to do what you are actually supposed to do.

And if you are out of enough, and at the bottom of some well, that wasn’t the well.

If you’re out of patience, you’re probably not called to be patient with this.

If you’re out of money, you’re not called to get it by buying.

If you’re out of generosity, maybe don’t give.

God doesn't expect you to do more than god gave you resources for, is what Memere might have meant.

This suffering is not a punishment. It’s not a test, sorry Job. It is showing you the bottom of a thing you were meant to spend, so that you would know infinite when you see it.

And it is nuts how far it goes down. How many times you can think it’s the bottom, and it’s not. How deep you can get and what the capacity is. 

And as far down as you ever go at a given time is enough.