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While I was serving St. Paul’s in Greensboro, AL, I got to meet Dr. John Dorsey, a fellow Episcopalian. The story of how he came to Greensboro is pretty remarkable.
John is a psychiatrist who had been practicing out in California. Somehow he ended up taking a job in a town so small in Alabama, I cannot remember the name of it.
Now this was around the time of Katrina, so John was driving all the way from California while trying to avoid getting hit by that horrifying storm. The worst part, if memory serves, was that when John finally got to his destination, the job he was supposed to have was no longer there for him.
Most of us probably would have gone back where we came and tried to rebuild. John, though, saw a lot of hope in the area. He found Greensboro nearby and, from the ground up, built a non-profit in the area called Project Horseshoe Farm. The program took young people, mostly pre-med students, and put them in the community where they helped the elderly and those living with mental illnesses and disabilities as well as local students through various programming.
I came to Greensboro a little over a decade after Horseshoe Farm got started. I got to see them continue to grow even then. They built a new headquarters shortly after I got there, and things didn’t end there. After that, a couple of the program fellows stayed another year and started another Horseshoe Farm branch in a nearby community. Now they have another site located in California, giving them three sites in total.
Project Horseshoe Farm started with very little. It began with a stranger finding himself in a small town, far away from home, with a vision of wanting to help people and to bring in others to help do that work.
When I was speaking with John Dorsey recently about his work, he spoke of it with the model of what Jesus did with the Apostles, sending them out to neighboring villages as we heard of just a few weeks ago, at the very start of this month. This is not just what John himself did, this is what he asked his fellows to do when they started a new site location for Project Horseshoe Farms, in twos just as the Apostles did. It doesn’t take a lot to do great things and grow in the community.
We don’t need a lot to do the work of God. In fact, as we see in our Gospel today, we need very little. The point of the feeding of the 5000, is that we can do something huge with very little.
When Jesus first speaks of feeding the others, these 5000 gathered around where He and the Apostles and teaching, all they are able to find are “five barley loaves and two fish.” That’s not enough to fill the bellies of 5000. It would barely fill the bellies of just a handful of people.
Yet Jesus breaks the bread and the fishes and some remarkable happens. Not only are the people fed, but out of fragments of just 5 loaves and 2 fishes is enough to fill 12 baskets full.
Not only is there enough food, there is more than enough left over.
Ephesians tells us “Now to Him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.”
This is the power of the One by Whom and in Whom such miracles as the feeding of the 5000 can be accomplished. It is through that same power that people like John Dorsey and programs like Project Horseshoe Farm are able to grow and thrive. It is the same power God can work in us in ways we could never expect or imagine.
It doesn’t take a lot to do the work of God in this world. Yet with a very little, we can do a lot. We are called on not to discount ourselves, but to lean into our Lord with Trust and Faith. If we can do that, and only then, we will see miracles. We might even start to observe, out of that little beginning, an overflowing abundance that we would have thought impossible to see otherwise.