“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
John 6:9 (NIV)
I want to share an incredibly true story I heard from a priest, Fr. Dan Reehil, who speaks on various talk shows on the EWTN network. He pastors a church in Tennessee, and told a story about a nun he knows personally, who had the privilege and blessing to experience the following miracle.
It happened in Medjugorje, a Croatian village in the Bosnia Herzegovina area. About ten years ago, her convent was asked to provide a dessert for a barbecue picnic event for 250 orphaned children in the nearby village. Other groups were assigned to bring different foods.
The nun who was asked to shop for the dessert, ordered 250 pudding cups to be delivered, unaware that she mistakenly gave the wrong date for delivery. The children arrived all excited about their picnic, but the nun in charge of dessert realized that she ordered the pudding cups for the wrong date. The only dessert she had was a sample pack of twelve pudding cups.
She frantically went to one of her older sisters, explaining the crisis. The older sister said something that may have seemed foolish, yet very familiar. She told her to just go and put out the twelve pudding cups that she had.
So, the twelve pudding cups were placed on the dessert table, for two hundred and fifty kids. The nun dreaded watching the first twelve children take a pudding cup, while the rest got nothing. It seemed like a foolish plan, but not any more foolish than Jesus ordering one boy’s lunch to feed a multitude.
Then the nuns prayed and watched 250 children go through that buffet line, and as they came to the dessert table, they each took a pudding cup, and all 250 children ended up with a pudding cup! It was like the gospel miracle of Jesus feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes.
When the nun told this story to
Fr. Dan, she emphasized that it wasn’t just the pudding that was multiplied, but it was multiplied in the original plastic cup packaging. He asked her why that is so significant. She said, “We now have all 250 empty cups as evidence of the miracle.”
Those empty cups are kept in the convent as relics of proof that Jesus still multiplies whatever we offer in His name, today. He once said “Let the children come to me,” because He cares about children and their needs, even if it is something that seems trivial or ordinary to us. He made sure that every child got their own pudding cup that day.
There is a heavenly math that is beyond all logic or understanding, when Jesus takes the least among us or uses our minimal capabilities, He multiplies it to bless many others. It’s how His kingdom on earth works. He cares about our ordinary wants as well as our heavy hearted urgent needs. Nothing is too ordinary or too heavy for Jesus, who love and cares for us.
In hearing this story, I realized that I often pray big but expect minimal. The nuns put out the minimal and the Lord answered bigger than they expected, with original packaging and all. When faith is put into action by offering whatever we have, Jesus shows up with His system of heavenly multiplication.
Fr. Dan summed it up by saying that we might have a twelve cup situation in our lives. We may not have enough money, enough patience, enough time, or enough faith for what the next week asks of us, but the Lord is telling us to bring Him our minimal and He will multiply it and make it go farther than we expect.
Lord, thank you for being the same God today that you were years ago. We give you what little we have, and trust that you will multiply it for your glory. Amen
