In almost every situation you face as a leader, there are those who will say at the outset, “Wow, this is too big,” or “Our resources are too small.”

Either way, there’s a failure to remember that the Lord is involved. You’ll do yourself a favor as a leader if you will reexamine the feeding of the five thousand regularly and study how Christ himself advanced Kingdom purposes.

In John 6, the word great is used twice to describe the crowd, and the word small is used twice to describe the resources — five small loaves and two small fish. In each Gospel record of the miracle, the disciples paint the size of the task as too big and their resources as too small. Even with Jesus in their presence, they do not grasp His ability.

Similarly, if you forget the Lord is with you and lose sight of His infinite ability, you will inevitably grow discouraged. Carrying out the ministry of the church is not just a matter of sitting down and calculating issues about resources and personnel like you would in a business. You must include the Spirit’s blessing, enablement, and empowerment in the equation.

After the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples gathered up twelve full baskets. Now, I’m going to put on my lawyer hat and say this was divine cause and effect. They had twelve baskets in which to put leftovers, so I’m going to assume they also had those baskets when they handed out the food at the beginning.

If you lose sight of the Lord’s infinite ability, you will grow discouraged.

I’m going to assume as well that the Twelve were the waiters. Jesus had called them forward, taken the little boy’s lunch, and broken the five small loaves and two small fish into the twelve baskets.

Consider that if you break five small loaves into twelve baskets, that’s less than half a loaf per basket. And two small fish translates into one-sixth of a fish in each basket.

I can envision the disciples standing there looking into their baskets, and seeing mostly basket. I’d love to have seen the expressions on their faces — incredulous, no doubt. Then Jesus said, “Go feed the crowd.”

Thomas probably looked at Him and said something like, “You’ve gotta be kidding! The guy in the front row will eat everything by himself. This is ridiculous. If You are going to do a miracle, then make a big pile of bread over here, a big pile of fish over here, and we’ll come and fill up our baskets and serve the crowd a row at a time. First row, second row, third row — we’ll keep doing that until we get to the very last person on the very last row. No more bread, no more fish. Everybody goes home happy.”

And Jesus, with a twinkle in His eye, shakes His head and says, “No. My miracles don’t happen that way; you’ll never build My Church that way. You want to start out with a full basket and end up with an empty one. I’ll always start you out with a nearly empty basket and you’ll wind up full.”

Adapted from the book Road Trip Leadership: Mileposts Along My Way in Ministry (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 2011).