May 11

“Philip answered him, Two hundred shillings’ worth of bread is not sufficient for them.” John 6:7

Have you noticed that the Gospels record two separate miracles in which Christ feeds a great company of people? Why two, when they were almost identical in nature and in the way they were performed? Is it perhaps because of our slowness to learn even urgent lessons? So many of us, instead of looking to the Lord to bless the bread, are looking down at the five loaves in our hands. They are so pitifully few, and so pitifully small.

We gaze at them, and we calculate, and we keep on wondering how they can ever meet the need. And the more we calculate and the more we wonder, the more laborious our attempts become and the more we are exhausted by the strain. I am comforted when I recall what a Chinese brother once said to me. It was this: “When God wants to perform a small miracle, he places us in difficult circumstances; when he wants to perform a mighty miracle, the circumstances in which he places us are impossible.”