Re-learning old lessons from the Christian life.
It could be that God has provided you what you need.
O God be in my mouth as I speak
for you and fill this place with your great grace, that we may leave this place
less of what we use to be and more of what we ought to be, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen
And Jesus said to them, “How
many loaves have you? Go and see.”
It is a great joy to return to
St. Martin’s this week after being up at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria
completing some course work for my doctorate.
The only thing I have left to do
is a thesis project and with some help from all of you this coming fall, I am
on course for graduation next spring.
In the past, I have found that
one good thing about time away is that I always return having re-learned old
lessons about the Christian life. This time was no different, and I want to
spend a little time this morning talking about one of those experiences I had
while I was away.
A few weeks ago prior to my
departure, I was in the office finishing packing up a few books. As most of you
are aware, airlines have instituted fairly stringent guidelines on the weight
of your suitcase, and it doesn’t take many books to go over the limit.
So to make traveling a bit
easier, I decided to put most of my treasured books into a box and ship them up
priority mail. I mailed them the Thursday before departure figuring, I would
receive them by Tuesday.
It won’t surprise you to know
that most of the books were by or about C. S. Lewis, but there were a few
others that I had collected over the years from various used book outlets.
Well, I flew off to Alexandria
on Monday morning, June 26, and I began to wait. And I waited, and waited. Tuesday came and went and still no box
appeared. By Friday I was becoming concerned and by the following Monday it
begin to dawn on me that priority mail only meant that the post office had a
priority to lose the box.
This is of course one of those
wonderful situations in life, where it is difficult to know whom you should
blame. The local post office at the seminary was not a lot of help. The place I
mailed it from was 500 miles away in Atlanta. The mailroom worker at the
seminary just shrugged his shoulders and shook his head whenever he saw me
approaching.
And of course well meaning
fellow students always asked me if I had sent it with any kind of tracking
number or return receipt.
Gee whiz how stupid of me, I
should have known they were going to lose it and then I would have done that.
So, what was I to do? One the
one hand, I could have just thrown in the towel on my thesis work and sat
around bemoaning the injustice of the US postal system (next time remind me to
use UPS).
This was an appealing option but
it had the disadvantage of not getting me toward my goal of graduating next
spring.
So after a few moments of
pounding my head against the wall, I realized it was time to get the lost books
out from the library, take advantage of the professors that were available on
campus and work on refining my thesis proposal.
After a few days of reading and
conversation, I begin to realize that I had plenty of resources to keep me busy
and focused on the work that I needed to do during this three-week academic
session.
Now I realize a lost box of
books probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to some of you who might be facing
difficult issues in your life. But this experience reminded me of an important
truth about the Christian life that I occasionally forget.
In the ups and downs of human life,
God generally gives you all the tools that you need to handle what might at
first appear to be a hopeless situation.
The familiar story from St.
Mark’s gospel reinforces this lesson as well.
Jesus is teaching a large crowd
of folks, evening comes, everyone is hungry, and there is no version of
Domino’s pizza in the first century.
Jesus asks his disciples to give
the folks some food. They say it is clearly an impossible task. Jesus asks what
do you have and they reply, two fish and five loaves. The crowd sits down on
the grass, Jesus blesses what they have and before you can say “Peter, Paul and
Mary,” loaves and fish multiply and there is plenty of food to go around.
At first glace, the message
seems simple. If you have Jesus at a party, you don’t have to worry about
running out of wine or food. But beneath the surface of this marvelous tale is
a lesson that Christians today need to hear again and again.
If we are open to the movement
of God’s spirit in our daily lives, we have within ourselves what we need to
get the task done. I didn’t have the books I thought I needed, the disciples
didn’t have the food they wanted, and many of us face times in our lives when
there seems little reason for any kind of hope or optimism.
Yet, when I hit that kind of
wall, when that feeling of despair arises within my own soul, I remember one of
my favorite quotes from the writer, Anne Lemott.
When you give up all hope,
you’re probably only giving up the hope of getting your outcome to happen….a
synonym for surrender is yield which means, agriculturally, to step aside and
let some something grow.
Through the years, I have
discovered that God works best in my life when things don’t seem to be going
the way I think they should, when that box never arrives.
In fact it is precisely in these
trying times when we surrender our desire for control, when we become
vulnerable to God’s purpose that we begin to discover there are, to our
surprise, enough fish and bread to go around.
Now in case you are wondering,
you should know my box of books still hasn’t shown up in either Atlanta or
Alexandria. And my wife, Cynthia reminded me that in some remote post office
somewhere in this world a C. S. Lewis fan has discovered a treasure trove that
appear to have been heaven sent.
And God has again reminded me
that it was time to let go of a few of my temporal possessions.
And to learn again the wonderful lesson that you and I always have enough fish and bread to do the work that God has called us to do, even in those difficult times when our “all important box” hasn’t shown up.
How many loaves have you? Go and
see.
Amen