Usually I do this with my wife and my daughters. As my daughters have grown up it was a family ministry. Now, my daughter are grown women. Our ministry is becoming more often, just my wife and I. One Saturday, my daughter was out of town. My wife and I were delivering meals, when my daughter called just as we pulled up to Ms. Sadie's house. While my wife chatted with my daughter, I took the meal and knocked on Ms. Sadie's door. Ms. Sadie was delighted to see me. She enjoyed the people who visited her with the meals. One set of visitors she really enjoyed was a young man and his two young sons. She loved to visit with those two beautiful young boys.
I told Ms. Sadie that God had given me many gifts and good looks was not high on the list. Usually my daughter and wife knock on the door to delivered the meals. As big and ugly as I am, I do not want to scare any of the elderly people who lived alone. Ms. Sadie look at me and summed it all up, "Honey, you're not ugly, you're just fat."
Sometimes God speaks to you in places and ways you may never recognize. In this passage from the Gospel of John, a man call's from the shore. "Children have you caught anything to eat." The apostles then recognized that it was the risen Christ.
Christ was not asking about their physical nourishment or how many fish they had caught. Christ was not asking them to make sure he had enough fish on the fire for breakfast. It was a hidden question the apostles should have recognized.
After Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman at the well, his disciples are telling him to "eat something." Jesus said to them "My food is to do the will of the him who sent me and to complete his work."(Jn 4:34) So Christ's hidden question was, "Are you carrying on my work? Are you fishing for men, are you casting your nets for the Kingdom? Is your food doing my will?"
It was all about their ministry. Peter and the apostles are to b spreading the Gospel to the world. Christ already has a few fish; but they are to cast the nets of their ministry and bring them to me.
I thought about Ms Sadie during the reflection on this passage. Maybe it was Christ speaking to me. The apostles were happy to be humiliated for preaching the Gospel, maybe I need to be as well. I'm not ugly in God's eyes and I have the right intention; but, maybe what nourishes me is not the will of the one who sent me.
We should all look at our lives and ask, "Are we still beautiful? or Have we gotten fat?" It is not that we have become physically ugly but have become spiritually fat. How we look to Christ is not our outward beauty. We are beautiful in God's work. We do not get fat if we do Christ's work in the world. We exercise our spiritual selves in our church life, in our ministries, and in our prayers.
You never know when Christ will speak to you, maybe through the words of an 85 year old woman.
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