Morning Devotional

October  19, 2005
"Using the Leftovers"      
    by Don Emmitte

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Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, looked up toward heaven, and asked God's blessing on the food. Breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread and fish to the disciples to give to the people. They all ate as much as they wanted, and they picked up twelve baskets of leftover bread and fish. Five thousand men had eaten from those five loaves! (Mark 6: 41-44 NLT).

Such waste there is in our world! Trash bins overflow with half-eaten food. Landfills are heaped with old appliances, furniture, and bags of garbage. Computers and electronics, outdated by new advancements, are just tossed away. Perfectly good food is thrown out at the expiration date, and outdated clothing is tossed in the trash.

My dad was a child of the depression. It colored everything he did. I remember the stories he told about getting up early in the morning and taking the few vegetables they had grown on their little place to market to sell them for what little money people might have to buy food in that day. It became the root of his belief that nothing should be wasted. I can remember many lessons learned from that one principle of truth. We often found ourselves repairing things until they simply could be repaired any longer. Even when it might have been easier to just get a new one, we fixed the old one.

In many ways I have become like that too. Perhaps that’s why I save so much stuff. Kyle and I are building an entertainment center for his home. I have yet to throw out any of the scrap material that has been generated by this project. Maybe I will at the end of it, but until then, you never know whether we’ll need that little strip of wood that I have cut away from another piece.

This is what struck me about Jesus in our reading today. How like Him to gather up the fragments. Does God ever waste anything? He takes our mistakes and turns them into lessons, restores wasted years and lives with His gift of salvation, takes our heartaches and uses them for His glory, gathers broken people and makes them whole, and even collects our tears (Psalm 56:8).

How comforting to know that God will never put us through one unnecessary minute of struggle, that every hard time will eventually be changed to good, and that each day of our life has reason and purpose. You can believe it: He doesn't waste anything. Trust him with ALL of your life today!