It is inevitable that I thought about hunger while sitting in church. I had just finished reading Hunger: An Unnatural History and I had skipped breakfast that morning, my stomach a churning, borborygmic dungeon. My stomach influenced my brain, and because I was at church, the rumblings mixed with the sermon, concocting a strange heady mix.
I remembered the big contention I had with God when I was a child. It was about the passage in Matthew 6 where Jesus tells us not to worry.
`"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?'
My question to God was always this: What about the children starving to death in Somalia? Do you not care?
I never got an answer to that one. Not in a direct way, anyway.
Coincidentally (or not), the sermon today was about Jesus feeding the masses with five loaves and two fish. A huge crowd was in the middle of the wilderness and Jesus had been teaching all day. The disciples asked Jesus to dismiss the crowd so that they could go buy food, but Jesus said,
"You feed them."
The ever-practical disciples pointed out to Jesus that eight months' wages wouldn't even be enough to feed a crowd this large. The numbers were too large. The problem too big. When the disciples looked for resources, all they found were five loaves and two fish, only a boy's lunch, half that of an adult's.
But Jesus broke the bread and the fish and distributed it to the crowd, and it was a miracle, because everyone was fed and there were twelve baskets of broken pieces of bread left over.
What a thought, that Jesus would make a miracle from our meagre contributions.
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