1 piece of bread

I had a meeting with one of the founders of the food bank at Third Phase in Indy last week named Betty, and she vividly recalled being in a shelter and having nothing to eat for three days when she was younger.  Her exact quot was ”not even one piece of bread” .   She recalled vowing to do everything in her power and praying that God would give her the ability to make certain that it would not happen to others, which was a seminal moment in her life that led to the establishment of the largest food bank in Hamilton County. 

As she looks around in an evening at Third Phase and sees sometimes thirty bags of bread that weigh forty pounds each that she can give to people in our community, it never crosses her mind that “it’s just bread”.  She knows better.  She remembers a time when she would have given anything for that type of nourishment, and there was none to be found.  Many people in our country are completely unaware how often people find themselves where Betty was when she was younger.  Even I examine very closely each potential delivery to make “judgements” on if it is “worth the time” of a Food Rescue volunteer to sacrifice their time. 

When I shared that with Betty, she looked at me as if I were from outer space, because she knew better.  A sacrificial act that mirrors the way Christ laid down His life for humanity is not always measured by the size of the delivery.  When we have experienced a big delivery the previous month and we find substantially less the subsequent month, we make value judgements that make the assumption the larger delivery was more valuable.   Volunteers are even more likely to become excited and share with others what they are doing when there is a “substantial” amount of food involved by their standards.

In Isaiah, it says if we spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry, that our light will rise in the darkness, and that our night will become like the noonday. 

It’s interesting that the act of”spending ourselves” in obedience to God seems to unloose the phenomenon, rather than the food itself.  The next time we experience a negative thought or disappointment in an amount that we deliver, we should heed the words of Isaiah, and trust that our obedience is sufficient for the Almighty God.