The love of God and a lump of bread

When the Privy Councillor of Medicine died, his sons began to sort out his estate. In a glass display case, which the old doctor had guarded like a shrine, they found, among other treasures and mementos, a strange object: a gray, shriveled and bone-hard lump – a dried-up piece of bread.

Perplexed, they asked the old housekeeper. The housekeeper told them that the doctor had once been seriously ill during the famine years after the World War. The acute illness was accompanied by a general state of exhaustion. Strong food was necessary – but rare. An acquaintance sent half a loaf of bread. Good, wholesome bread, which he himself had received from a foreigner friend.

At that time, the teacher's little daughter was sick in the neighboring house. The medical councilor therefore sent the bread to the teacher's family without eating it himself. But even they did not want to keep the bread. The old widow over there under the roof in the emergency quarters needed it more. She passed it on to her daughter with the two children in the puny basement apartment. She remembered the sick medical councillor who had recently treated one of her boys without asking anything in return.

"We recognized it at once," concluded the housekeeper, "by the stamp stuck on the bottom of the bread, showing a colorful little picture." When the Medical Councillor held his own bread in his hands again, he was shaken beyond measure and said, "As long as there is still love among us that shares its last piece of bread, as long as I have no fear for all of us helps; This bread has filled many people without a single one eating it."

This story makes tangible the power of love: "The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." (Romans 5:5) And this love is palpable in our four walls: this good, loving spirit is blowing. No, our houses are not gray concrete, it is rather living space for the good spirit of God. But the spirit also breaks many a space and frame. Because this love can be experienced through our heart attitude beyond all borders: We do not only keep what we have for ourselves, but give others a share of it – so that something remains!

And so, once again, and in the midst of us, in the here and now, a miracle happens: a feeding of thousands – three thousand employees and over six thousand people entrusted to us – they are fed.

I wish this miracle for all of us again and again.