Many of my students wrote wonderful essays, essays that blessed my life. Joel wrote one of them. He had come back to school on a Sunday afternoon with five dollars in his pocket and remembered he had not yet tithed on his fifty dollar pay check. He was happy that he had just enough in his pocket to give to the Lord, but he was worried because the school does not offer Sunday evening meals, and he knew he had no way to eat anything until the next morning. He knelt by his bed and prayed that God would take his offering and help him not snatch it back to combat his hunger. Before the night was over, our almost hilariously generous God supplied my student, through several different means, more food than he could possibly eat. His testimony of God’s goodness and care moved me, but what moved me as much was his offering to the Lord.

I read that and began to think a lot about kneeling before my bed with a sincere offering of my own.

Not long afterwards, I started reading the New Testament from Peterson’s THE MESSAGE. Two passages in Matthew made me think once again about bringing an offering to God.

The first one was in Matthew 14, the feeding of the 5,000. “All we have are five loaves of bread and two fish,“ they said. Jesus said, “Bring them here.“

Those words echoed in my mind, actually, more in my heart, I think.
“All we have is. . . .“
“Bring them here.“
“All I have is. . . .“
“Bring them here.“

All I have? What do I have to offer?

I am slow to admit it, but the truth is, I have at least some writing talent, and my pursuit of fiction at this late date has been an act of faith; it has been an offering. I have been offering a few other things lately, too. We all have good things to bring him. Most of us have various talents, our education, financial resources, and ministry opportunities. These are just some of the things we can lay before Him.

I believe doing this will make all the difference in our lives in Christ. I wrote this prayer in the margin of my Bible by Matthew 14: “Lord I bring you what I have. Bless it, break it, and make it more than enough for anything you want me to do. Please. (And please let me keep bringing my “loaves and fish.“)

I may be different from you in another way, though. I hate this truth: Sometimes “all I have” doesn’t seem like much, for I have many weaknesses, maybe more than I have strengths. Strangely enough, Matthew 15 convinced me to offer him my weaknesses as well. “They came, tons of them, bringing along the paraplegic, the blind, the maimed, the mute-all sorts of people in need-and more or less threw them down at Jesus’ feet to see what he would do with them. He healed them.“

No one is going to throw us and our need before the feet of Jesus. But better than ignoring our weaknesses or lamenting them, would be kneeling by our bed and bringing those needs to Jesus, just as we bring him our strengths. We’ll have to put aside our pride and face our shame in order to do it, but it is worth it, for He will “heal” us. Whether it is through transformation or by forgiving us and covering us with his righteousness, his touch will make us whole.

I would encourage you today to bring him what you have—good and bad. Certainly it will make a difference for us personally, and it will make a difference to people in our lives who need to see His work in us.

Maybe those around us will be like “the people who saw the mutes speaking, the maimed healthy, the paraplegics walking around, the blind looking around—they were astonished and let everyone know that God was blazingly alive among them.“