Bread of Life

I’ve just returned from a very quick trip to Nepal to bring Ainsley home after her three-month placement with a Samaritan’s Purse partner. She has spent the fall living in a group home among children with disabilities—children their culture has labelled “less than,” “defective,” or “shameful.” And yet for months she played with them, taught them, and—by sheer presence—helped communicate the truth: you matter, you are loved, you belong.

This is a very special, and sacred place.

Saturday morning, I had the privilege of worshipping together with the church.

These are the people of God.

They live Psalm 46.
They live it in their cells.

“God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear…”

We read this comforting verse on coffee mugs and bookmarks, but for them this is survival. They cling to God not as one option among many, but as their only hope. If He does not come through, they have nothing else.

And yet these people give. Not from abundance or from margin. They give from poverty—quietly, almost instinctively. They trust that God will take their little and multiply it, the way Jesus took a few loaves and fish and fed thousands.

In fact, I observed Him doing exactly that.

Visiting with the partner after service, I learned that a wheelchair-rehabilitation grant from a UK foundation—funding for a service that does not exist anywhere else in the country—had finally been approved after weeks of uncertainty. Somehow their giving and God’s provision met in the same breath...in my presence.

Communion with the Nepali church

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said in John 6.
Not the bread of comfort.
Not the bread of safety.
The bread of life.

In that small, crowded church—children on the floor, elders sitting along the wall, some scarred by leprosy, some in wheelchairs—I saw a people who draw life from Jesus the way branches draw life from a vine. They have no other source. No backup plan. No alternative supply line.

Their dependence makes room for His presence.

And then came communion.

A tiny piece of bread. A small cup of juice. A universal sacrament. As I held them in my hands, I felt more connected to the body of Christ than I have in years. Perhaps because these dear saints receive communion the way starving people receive bread. They know the One sustaining them is not only their strength or their supply—it is the God who is “very present” in their trouble, the Bread who gives life, the Vine in whom they abide.

God leans in toward people like this.

It struck me with piercing clarity:

The Kingdom of God belongs to them…
To. Them.

To the poor in spirit.
To those who cry out because they have no one else.
To the ones who cannot imagine life apart from the Vine.

I flew home grateful, heart filled, humbled—and painfully aware of how often I give God only what costs me nothing.

But in that small Nepali church, I watched a people who believe—deeply, instinctively—that if God does not show up, they will not make it.

And He does.
Every time.