an example of the ordinary turned extraordinary
After writing last week about the tension between an ordinary and extraordinary life, I wanted to explore an example of this from the Bible.
It can be hard to believe that God is working in the ordinariness of our lives to do extraordinary things. I don’t know about you, but my life feels overwhelmingly ordinary. So ordinary that it’s beyond God’s interest or desire to work in.
Sometimes I wonder what am I doing with my life. I want to give up on God’s call for my life to do something flashier and more attention-worthy. But there’s a Bible story that I remind myself of every time I grow discouraged with how ordinary my life and contribution to society feels. That’s the account of Jesus and the miracle of the little boy’s lunch.
In John 6, we read that Jesus had attracted a huge crowd of people to himself through the healing of the sick and the lame. As this group of 5,000 men, as well as women and children, followed Jesus and his disciples up a mountain, Jesus asked Phillip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?”
Phillip was dumbfounded at what seemed like a ridiculous question. “Don’t you know,” Phillip responded to Jesus, “That 200 days of work wouldn’t make enough money to buy enough food to give this many people even a taste, much less be filled?!” You can feel Phillip’s shock; he can’t understand why Jesus would even entertain such a far-fetched idea. He makes it clear to Jesus that he thinks this is a logistically impossible task. There’s no way they could afford to buy enough food to feed all of these people.
Andrew, another disciple, was slightly more resourceful and seems to have gone out to see what was available in the crowd. Coming back, he reported to Jesus that he’d found a boy with a working-class lunch of five barley loaves and two fish. “But what are they?” he added, highlighting the impossibility of Jesus’ request to feed this giant crowd. The disciples were stuck, they had neither the money nor the food to complete Jesus’ absurd request.
The rest of course is history. Jesus took the five loaves and two fish and told the disciples to have the people sit down. He then gave thanks for the food, and after his prayer, the disciples started to distribute the bread and fish. Miraculously, the food fed 5,000 men plus women and children until they were all stuffed, even leaving 12 baskets of food left over.
So what does this miracle have to do with the tension between living an ordinary and extraordinary life? This miracle shines a light on how God partners with our ordinary lives to build His extraordinary kingdom.
When we read about this miracle, the emphasis of the story is always on Jesus, and rightfully so, He’s the main character both in this story and the entire Bible. The problem, though, when we read stories like this, is that we often subconsciously believe that our job is to be the Jesus figure in our own lives, the one who makes the miracle happens. We want to use our lives to make big things happen and create an impact for God.
But we all know if that were to happen, it wouldn’t be God who got the glory, but us. As Dallas Willard pointed out, “Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.”
Instead, our role in God’s kingdom is to be like the unnamed boy. This boy had followed the crowd out to see Jesus, planning ahead and packing a lunch. Now, he was standing in the crowd as the disciples combed this motley crew of poor, sick, and crippled people trying to find enough food to help feed the crowd.
John doesn’t say how it happened, but when the boy heard the disciples’ request for food he gave his lunch to Andrew. And in a stunning turn of events, this boy’s lunch became the seed of Jesus’ incredible miracle, as he multiplied five bread and two fish until the entire crowd couldn’t eat another bite.
While we usually brush over this boy’s contribution, I think his actions are noteworthy. Let’s be honest, if I were that boy, I would have thought, “How could my lunch do anything to help? How could this food make a dent in the need? I’ll just keep it hidden right here in my cloak and make sure I’m taken care of.”
So what can we learn from this boy? He did three things that stand out:
He surrendered his stuff: This boy willingly gave up his lunch to Jesus’ disciples when they asked for food. He willingly gave the food to the disciples, with no idea or control over what they were going to do with it. He didn’t dismiss his lunch as insignificant but contributed it to the cause.
He sacrificed his security: By surrendering his lunch, he went from having a nice lunch to what seemed like a high likelihood of having no lunch at all, with nothing to show for it. He probably could’ve sold his lunch for a nice return, but yet he gave away his food, even though he had no way of getting any more. Even though he had planned ahead, he had to risk going hungry like everyone else.
He trusted Jesus’ plan: This boy gave his lunch to Jesus’ disciples, not aware of what was going to happen. He did trust this teacher, though, and that this teacher that he’d been following around was worth trusting. Jesus’ disciples saw no way to feed the crowd and didn’t have much faith in Jesus, but the boy offered his food to Jesus in faith, trusting that it would help somehow.
What’s my point with all of this? It’s that through this boy’s faithful obedience to Jesus, his ordinary contribution to God’s kingdom was transformed by Jesus’ power into an extraordinary outcome. This boy’s unremarkable act was used by Jesus to perform an unforgettable miracle, creating such an incredible event that we’re still talking about it 2,000 years later.
It stands to reason that if God doesn’t change, He’s still working in similar ways today. And so Jesus’ interaction with His disciples plays itself out even in our lives:
First, in the same way that Jesus challenged the disciples to feed the crowds, God gives us kingdom goals and dreams to challenge our faith in Him.
Second, in the same way that the disciples responded, we approach the problem from either human terms and give up, or think we need to play God and make a miracle happen ourselves.
Third, God calls us to offer up our five loaves and two fish, as He uses our ordinary contributions to work an incredible miracle in a way that is far beyond what we could ever imagine.
Too often, though, I’m like the disciples and get stuck on how I can solve the challenge myself. I approach God’s kingdom through a lens of rational thinking (we don’t have enough money, time, talent, energy, etc.) and don’t see how God could use the ordinary things of life to make even a dent in the problems and challenges around me. I lack the childlike faith of this boy, who didn’t know what was going to happen but was open to Jesus’ working in ways that even the disciples weren’t.
As I progress through my life, I’ve tried to use this boy’s lunch to remind myself that my job isn’t to use my gifts to make a miracle happen, but to contribute them to what God’s doing. God doesn’t want me to despise my personal “five loaves and two fishes” for being too insignificant, but calls me to offer it up to His kingdom, trusting that He will do more with it than I could ever imagine.
So the next time you’re tempted to despair at the ordinariness of your life and its apparent lack of impact, I hope you’ll remember the faithful obedience of this boy. God has given you something, even if it seems as insignificant as a little lunch to a hungry crowd, to offer up in service to His kingdom.
We all have different loaves and fishes, whether that’s writing, teaching, leading, parenting, loving, or caring for others, but the point remains. Our role in God’s kingdom is not to provide the power to make things happen but to offer up our little lives and let Jesus work through them. When we partner with what God’s doing, He promises to do extraordinary things in the midst of what feels mundane.
When this happens, God gets the glory and we’ll recognize that through the power of the Holy Spirit, all things are possible, even ones that seem beyond belief. This is what Paul wants us to see through his prayer in Ephesians 3:
“Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.”
When we offer up our ordinary gifts and trust God to work, He promises to weave all of the strands of our little lives into one great kingdom tapestry. We’re each just one thread, but together with the billions of other Christians that have lived and will live, God is using our ordinary lives to accomplish His extraordinary purposes.
