No Way

"But Moses responded to the Lord, 'There are 600,000 foot soldiers here with me, and yet you say, I will give them meat for a whole month!'" Numbers 11:18-23

"The disciples replied, 'Where would we get enough food here in the wilderness for such a huge crowd?'" Matthew 15:32-39

Honestly, some things are just hard to believe. While on one of my internet rabbit trails, I stumbled across an article about the guy who holds the world record for keeping your body in the plank position. It was over 8 hours! Not minutes, hours! I'm good for like 80 seconds. 8 hours is absolutely staggering. Seriously, in normal life, how many people do you know holding a plank for over 8 hours? "No way!" We hear those words all the time, don't we? And then, we read a story about a "plank master" and think, "Well, maybe there is a way." 

From our scriptures today, we discover that people have been saying "No way!" to God for thousands of years. Moses did. The disciples did. If we look deeply into most of the Biblical characters, we'll find a "no way" in there somewhere. I wonder if Jesus chuckled to himself just a little when the disciples told him that there was no way they could feed all these people. "Do you guys remember the story of the quail, the people of Israel in the wilderness and Moses?" 

We spend an awful lot of time and energy constricting our lives to those things that fall under "possible." We dismiss the nudge of the Holy Spirit to step out into the "no ways" he's prepared for us. After all, no one can walk on water, give sight to the blind and command demons to flee. No one can heal the diseased, create something out of nothing and certainly not walk out of their own grave. No way. We naturally drift toward what we see as predictable, manageable, accessible and ordinary. Perhaps one day we'll begin to recognize as Moses and the disciples did that God is more than able to make a way when there is no way.

 

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