When I was a child my mother insisted that I finish the food on my plate before leaving the table. Usually there was a problem, I really did not like some of the food she had put on my plate in the first place. “There are starving people in Africa and Asia who would do anything to have the food you are wasting,” she pronounced on more than one occasion. “Well, just send it to them if it’s that important!” was my standard response, “they can have it!”
Since that time I have come face to face with the haunting smells and anguishing visage of starvation among prisoners and outcast refugees in various parts of the world. Many are the times I have wished that I could provide the morsels I have wasted in order to provide food for the hungry. I have found no way to come to terms with the disparity between my easy access to food and their unrelenting hunger – no way to come to terms with God’s power and human starvation. Often I have wished that Jesus would just show up and multiply the rice and mealy-meal in the real world today. I have even prayed in the presence of starving people for their hunger to be satisfied beyond my paltry means. Perhaps my faith is not bold enough to dare God to feed the starving children in a single slum, much less to feed the starving masses of the world.
But I am a believer.
One day when Jesus and the disciples were faced with a one-day hungry crowd, the disciples urged Jesus to send them away into the towns and villages so that they could buy what they needed. Instead, Jesus had them sit while he prepared a veritable feast from just five little loaves of bread and a couple of fish. When all was said and done the people were more than satisfied with plenty of food left over. I wonder what happened to the twelve baskets full of left-overs – did anyone give a passing thought to the starving masses elsewhere in the world?
I have heard various explanations of this miraculous story – that it wasn’t really a miracle but one of generous giving in which the generosity of one person motivated others in the crowd to share what they had and by the time all the sharing was done there was more than enough to feed everyone in the crowd. However, I take the story at face value and believe that Jesus did have the power to do what he did. By faith I affirm what happened in the gospels, but faith or no faith, I don’t see it happening now. Yet deep down I cling desperately to the belief that Jesus, not the World Food Programme, has the real power to satisfy world hunger. So why doesn’t He?
Father Timothy who lives and works among the suffering poor in Latin America told me about a very poor group of women who support his work in the prison. Every week they would pool their meagre resources to bake small loaves of bread for Fr. Timothy to take into the prison for the men. Although they are poor they had always been able to collect enough flour to make enough loaves to feed the prisoners. Then came the day the women simply didn’t have sufficient flour, but they baked what they could and gave the loaves to Fr. Timothy.
“I knew right away that there were not enough loaves of bread in the bag to go around,” he told me. “How could I possibly go to the prison and give some men bread and others not. They depend on the bread I bring.” As he shared his concern with the women they simply said – “But Father that’s all we have, God will provide, just go in faith and He will do it.”
Reluctantly, Fr. Timothy took the bag of bread to the prison and began distributing the loaves among the inmates. Reaching into the bag, he passed out the small loaves one by one, and as the last man came forward Fr. Tim reached into the bag one more time and took out the remaining loaf.
Looking at me, his voice cracking with emotion, Fr. Timothy said – “I know, Ronald, that the women did not give me that many loaves, I know that what they gave me was not nearly enough. All of my life I’ve preached about faith, but it was not my faith — my faith is so small compared to those women.”
Why is speaking of faith, or writing of faith so much safer and more comfortable for some of us than living by faith? What would radical faith look like in our world? In my community? In my marketplace? In my family? Not just when it comes to bread, but when it comes to the problems and the needs and the challenges and the conflicts
Ron W. Nikkel is the president and CEO of Prison Fellowship International (PFI). For more information, visit the PFI website.