When Jesus stood up to teach the people in Galilee, they listened until it was past supper time. His disciples panicked because they didn’t have enough food for them. Just then a boy walked up with a sack lunch of 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. 

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. 

Jesus took the boy’s meal, thanked him, and worked a miracle, feeding all 5,000 people using nothing but those 5 loaves and 2 fish.

When you’re seven years old this story makes your heart glow, but when you grow up, it changes, grays, dulls.

Adults hear this story and hear a fantasy story, something best not believed in. A dream.

But there is no better lesson in life than to understand the economy built into the world that God made. He didn’t build a world out of scraps, hoping it would all line up in decent symmetry and tolerant beauty. He built it out of His excess and it was perfect. 

Otherwise why in the world does a Rhinoceros exist when it looks like it shouldn’t?

You don’t find pieces of the universe left undone.

When you remove God from the conversation, all you are is a child with 5 loaves and 2 fish—which is why we adults turn our backs on our dreams. We realize how incapable we are to solve actual problems in our lives, much less everyone else’s. 

But when you add God back in, for real, in real time and space, you start wondering just how far God will take it. 5,000? 10,000? 100,000?

Just how far can we push this?

This becomes an illness for adults, a sort of blindness that limits their vision to only the next step or two. 

They are in the crowd, hungry, with no food, and a boy comes around with a little meal, and they wonder how in the world they can make a little bit feed more than just a handful. 

Instead of looking to Jesus for a miracle, as a child would, they look to themselves.

Which is why sometimes the best teachers are children. They are indomitable. When we were kids, nothing could rob us of what we knew we were capable of. Until we took Algebra 1, Organic Chemistry (or the equivalent), and then that sort of changed things.

Adulthood and the routines of life have beaten the majority of us down into a shell of our childhood selves, content to just simply make it through. Our dreams are much smaller, our passions more tame, our desires too small.

I am very passionate about this because, sure, not all limitations can be overcome, but most can—the ones we setup for ourselves definitely can. 

It just requires some clarity, encouragement: consistent and regular encouragement. 

Over the next few weeks we are going to do just that. 

A lot of my columns focus on this, actually, this reality of adulthood and the tension between who we’ve become and who we were as children, bright-eyed, carefree, and yearning for what could have been. 

The reason is because I firmly believe, both in theory and in practice, that people underestimate themselves and ask too little of God, which leads to a marginally unfulfilled life and a family and community robbed of who they could have become.

In short, we adults have decided to content ourselves to play in a sandbox when God offers us a vacation at the sea.

So starting next week we are going to take this conversation to the next level and remind ourselves of what we hardly ever spend time thinking about.

Just think: if 2 fish can feed 5,000, then how many can 20 feed?