By Joanne Brokaw

Have you ever worked with a group of people and felt like everyone had something to offer except you? It’s as if you’ve all been invited to a potluck and everybody else brought gourmet meals while you’re standing there with your empty casserole dish.

I was listening to a speaker talk recently about the miracle when Jesus fed the multitudes. While the disciples debated the impossibility of feeding such a crowd, Andrew took inventory to see what resources were available to get the job done. With only a poor boy’s lunch of five loaves and two fish, Jesus fed more than 5,000 people (and had enough leftovers for a casserole or two).

What always strikes me about that story is that if I’d been that little boy, by the time Andrew got to me I’d have eaten my lunch and only had breadcrumbs and fish heads left to show for it.

It’s not that I’m selfish. It’s just that when I see the enormous work that needs to be done and take stock of what little I have to offer, I tend to use what I have for my own needs. After all, what good are five loaves and two fish with so many mouths to feed?

Consider this: according to Wycliffe Bible Translators, more than 2200 language groups worldwide don’t have a single verse of Scripture in their own language.

Two-thirds of the world’s population lives in the 10/40 window, an area that lies across Africa and Asia and includes 85% of the world’s poorest poor and the majority of the world’s Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists. Ninety-five-percent of people living there have never heard of Jesus.

Forty-percent of the world’s population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water and 2.4 billion people worldwide don’t have adequate sanitation.

Almost 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV/AIDS.

I don’t speak a foreign language. I don’t live in the 10/40 window. I can’t provide clean water to millions of people. I’m not a doctor.

In other words, my lunch box is pretty empty.

Then I read on BloodWaterMission.com that a donation of just one dollar can help provide clean water to an African for one year.

Wait, I have a dollar.

I sponsor a child through Compassion International. Not only does my meager $32 a month provide supplemental food, tuition, health care and education to a little boy in India, my regular letters and cards over the past seven years have been an encouragement to us both. He’s started a relationship with Jesus. His Hindu parents go on Christian retreats. He knows that a stranger he’ll never meet loves him.

You can write letters to a child, can’t you?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 65.4 million Americans volunteered in 2005. Surely you can read to an elderly person or deliver meals to the homebound. Perhaps you can hug participants at the Special Olympics or swing a hammer for Habitat for Humanity.

Except that what you can do isn’t the point.

Most of the time, we want to take stock of our talents and gifts and then see how God can use them. But in Scripture, God calls the most unqualified and then equips them for the job.

I know because it’s happened to me. I hate flying, can’t speak Spanish, don’t know sign language and can’t tell a hammer from a ball point pen. And yet several years ago I flew to Mexico to spend a week doing construction at a school for deaf children.

Talk about calling and then equipping.

If I’d taken stock of my gifts and talents first I never would have gotten on the plane. And I would have missed a life-changing opportunity to see myself through God’s eyes instead of my own. What can I do? Anything God wants me to do. Where can I do it? Wherever He wants, including my own back yard.

So rather than sitting around picking through your lunch box to see what you might have to offer Jesus, why not just hand over the whole thing? Trust me. God can use your breadcrumbs and fish heads.