How many lunches do you pack? One for yourself? One for your husband and yourself? Three for your kids? I technically only pack my husband’s, but I still feed my five homeschooled girls every day. It’s a pretty basic task, sometimes repetitive, sometimes mundane, and sometimes I quite frankly would rather toss out some cheese sticks and call it good.
That perspective, however, comes from not understanding the worth of the packed lunch. Lunch packing is biblical after all. Did you know there was a story about packing lunches in the Bible? I didn’t, until I was a mom.
When I became a mom, many aspects of the gospel spoke to me in new ways because in many ways I was a new person with new responsibilities, experiences, and understanding. So, it is no surprise that many times my reading of familiar passages of scripture revealed a new angle that I hadn’t considered before.
One such story is the feeding of the five thousand in John 6. Chances are you have heard it. A ton of people are out in the middle of nowhere to hear Jesus preach. It’s an amazing opportunity for the spread of the gospel. One problem: everyone is hungry and there is no food. In comes a boy with some loaves and fish. God performs a miracle and provides an abundant amount of food by multiplying those loaves and fishes to feed the crowd, with plenty leftover.
But, that isn’t what I think about. I think about his mother. The boy’s mother. The woman who probably baked the bread and packed the fish into that boy’s lunch.
I consider her humble service and how very necessary it was whether she knew it or not. It was a smaller piece of a larger miracle. Her simple, daily obedience to pack a lunch directly impacted the ministry of Jesus.
Don’t you wonder if she was grumbling that morning as she took on the day’s work, or maybe she was serving joyfully and doing her work “as unto the Lord” as scripture commands (Colossians 3:23-24).
She had no way of knowing that on that day her work was literally for the Lord. His hands would touch the bread and fish and they would be part of a miracle that went down in history. Jesus himself probably ate it. Hungry people ate of it and stuck around to hear Jesus talk and potentially have their lives forever changed by the gospel.
When we are working on tasks that appear to be mundane, are we trusting that there is a purpose in them? I am sure the mother packing that little lunch had very few aspirations for it, yet it had a great purpose beyond what she could have imagined.
The hypothetical mother that I envision in this story never received a scriptural mention or an earthly reward, but I’ll wager she received an eternal one. What might we discover one day about the impact our daily, repetitive duties had on the world and the gospel? What did the packing of lunches lead to?
To everyone else on that day, the disciples probably appeared to be the most important helpers to Jesus’ ministry, but He used a packed lunch instead.
In this world, honor is often bestowed upon the flashy, big, professional, certified, and accomplished. God, however, values work done from a right heart for a high calling. So go pack a lunch, yours or someone else’s, and do it for the gospel.
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