Where shall we buy bread?

Another team from Mountain View, Va., left this morning at 5 a.m. First of all, it has been such a spiritual blessing to have two teams from Mountain View come to Costa Rica to serve - their church sends two or three teams a year to work with us and I have loved getting to know everyone.

Before the team got here I was a little apprehensive about how the week would go because of our lack of resources (or maybe just my lack of knowledge of what our resources were). The team did a VBS of sorts for the kids in the community and I was envisioning riots or chaos in the planche. As you can see from the photo, the kids are lined up anticipating a water balloon toss and there's no craziness. We had some volunteer translators and prepared team members who worked together to produce an organized and safe week for the children.

It's so refreshing to see how God uses what we have, even when it doesn't seem like enough. The other day I was reading in John. John 6:1-15 to be exact. Although I've read this passage a million times I was struck by what Jesus said. This particular passage is about feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish and Jesus' way of doing this miracle really impacted me. It says, "When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, 'Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?' He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do."

Now, the first thing I thought was why would Jesus test him in this way? Especially if he already knew what he was going to do...so Philip said there wasn't enough money (how many times have I said that?) and Peter pointed out there was only a boy's lunch there, so how on earth would that feed 5,000 people? And I realized how often I do that. How often I look at my resources in my own hands instead of in Christ's hands. I was blown away by the simple question that Jesus asked. I think He wanted to know if Peter and Philip would trust him to provide instead of pointing out the obvious (hello, of course there's not enough money or food to go around).

So my new prayer has been to give God my resources daily - my thoughts, my gifts and everything else. And to trust that He can do far more than what I can do.