She Never Asked for Food
The word for Sunday, August 16, 2026 is She Never Asked for Food.
The anchor verses are John 11:35 and Romans 8:24.
Union, Michigan has one flashing stoplight. There is a pizza place on the highway called Rosco's.
Earlier this month, in the middle of the dinner rush, with orders stacked at the counter and the phone going constantly, Shanna Crice picked up a call.
A woman's voice, timid. And the question was this.
Do you have any food that you throw away at the end of the night?
Read what she asked for.
Not a meal. Not money. Not help. She asked whether there was anything already headed for the garbage, because that would be a thing she could take without costing anybody. She had worked out in advance how to need something without being a burden while she needed it.
Crice answered her and hung up and went back to the rush.
Later, out making deliveries, it caught up with her. She had not asked the woman a single question. Her boyfriend Troy, who owns the place now, wondered out loud whether they could offer her a job. Crice went back through the call log and could not tell which number it had been, because too many calls had come in that night.
She could not find her.
So she thought about the shop's Facebook page, where they sometimes post a discount when a pizza comes out of the oven wrong. Maybe she reads those. Maybe if I post about it, she will see it and call.
The post went up. By the time they opened the next day the phone was ringing again, and this time the callers were asking for Shanna, because they wanted to donate.
She ordered a bulletin board that night. Within a week it was on the wall. Ten dollar meal tickets pinned to it, each one with a little heart sticker naming where the donor lives. Arkansas. Florida. Portugal. Spain. France.
Then she noticed the post had traveled further outside town than in it, so she called the school and the churches and told them to send families her way.
As far as anyone knows, the woman who called has not come in.
Open the eleventh chapter of John, where a man named Lazarus has been dead four days and his sisters have been burying him and grieving him and receiving visitors.
Jesus arrives. Martha comes out to meet HIM and says the thing she has been saying all week. If you had been here, my brother would not have died.
Then Mary comes and falls down in front of HIM and says exactly the same sentence.
HE does not correct either one of them.
Jesus wept.
Now hold on to what HE knew when HE did that. HE was minutes away from calling that man out of the tomb by name. HE knew it. HE had told the disciples days earlier that HE was going to wake him up.
HE cried anyway.
That is not a small thing where GOD is concerned. HE was not overwhelmed by a situation HE could not handle. HE had the situation entirely in hand. And the sight of those two women crying got to HIM anyway, and HE did not hide it, and HE did not hurry past it to the part where HE fixed it.
There were teachers a hundred years later who could not accept that, and they built entire systems to get around it. One of them taught that the divine part of Christ left before the suffering started, because a spiritual being could not be affected by anything. It got out in time.
John says the opposite in two words.
HE stood in front of a grave HE was about to open, in the middle of people who were crying, and HE cried with them. Not instead of the miracle. On the way to it.
Paul writes to Rome that hope which is seen is not hope, because a person does not hope for what he already has in his hands. Which means hope, by definition, is what you are holding when the thing has not happened yet.
That woman in Michigan asked for the leftovers.
You may be doing a version of that right now. Asking for less than you need, because less feels like something you are allowed to want. Timing the ask for when nobody is busy. Telling people you are fine, and then telling them again.
The board on that wall in Union has tickets on it from Portugal because one woman asked for garbage and somebody could not stop thinking about it.
And GOD did not send a system. HE came, and HE stood at a grave, and HE cried in front of everybody.
Whatever else that means, it means HE is not waiting for you to phrase it better.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who asks for the smallest possible version of what you need.
- 🙏 To the one who has been saying if only, and has been told to stop saying it.
- 🙏 To the one who called once and could not call back.
- 🙏 To the one holding something that has not happened yet, and calling it hope.
Grace and Peace.