Mark 8:16-21 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have no bread.… Let me suggest some possible parallels between ourselves and the disciples, maundering over their one loaf — with the Bread of Life at their side in the boat. We, too, dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. To those who possess their souls in patience come the heavenly visions. When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed — the loss of some little article, say — spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower, and fret over the missing volume, while there are thousands on my shelves, from which the moments thus lost might gather treasures, holding relation with neither moth, nor rust, nor thief; am I not like the disciples? Am I not a fool whenever loss troubles me more than recovery would gladden? God would have me wise, and smile at the trifle. Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God; it comes to teach us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth, and a revealment to my heart? I wanted to keep it, to have it, to use it by and by, and it is gone! I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that thought be recovered — to be far more lost, perhaps in a notebook, into which I shall never look again to find it! I forget that it is live things God cares about — live truths, not things set down in a book, or in a memory, or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things lifting up the heart, things active in an active will. True, my lost thought might have so worked; but had I faith in God, the Maker of thought and memory, I should know that, if the thought was a truth, and so alone worth anything, it must come again; for it is in God — so, like the dead, not beyond my reach; kept for me, I shall have it again. (G. Macdonald, LL. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have no bread.WEB: They reasoned with one another, saying, "It's because we have no bread." |
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