I'll never forget my first camera—a Kodak point-and-shoot "Brownie." After slipping in a roll of black and white negatives, I couldn't wait to try it out. But when it came time to see the results of my pointing and shooting, I had to wait. Wait until someone could drive me into town to get the negatives developed. Wait until the negatives could be processed into prints. Wait until someone could drive me back into town to pick up the prints. Only then was it possible to enjoy the fruits of my labor. This all seems quite archaic in today's digital age. Now you just grab your digital imaging device—be it a camera, phone, PDA, or whatever—knock off a few pix of the subject of the moment, upload them into cyberspace, and share them with the world. Meanwhile, you still have the images yourself, no matter how many people you send them to or how many times you transmit them.
This concept of having-and-sharing didn't exist when I was growing up. I never imagined that I could have—and give away—the same photo an infinite number of times without ever diminishing my own supply. It turns out, of course, that I could have. The principle behind the ability to perform that feat existed back them. The only difference was that no one had discovered it yet, nor had anyone accepted the possibility that it could be done. And yet, although the concept was totally foreign to my generation, it was not foreign to someone who lived almost two thousand years earlier.
I'm talking, of course, about Jesus. One of my favorite Bible stories talks about how he fed multitudes with a few of loaves of bread and two small fish. He'd been preaching to a large audience and in the early evening, instead of sending the people away to find something to eat, Jesus invited them to sit down. He then took the only food available—five loaves of bread and two small fish—and asked the disciples to distribute them to the people. At the end, after everyone had eaten, the disciples gathered up 12 baskets of leftover fragments of bread and fish.See Mark 6:34-44 .
