Welcome to Our Daily Bread. I'm Sheridan Voizzi, and I've called today's devotional Partnership with God.

When my friend and her husband struggled to conceive, doctors recommended she have a medical procedure done.

But my friend was hesitant.

Shouldn't prayer be enough to fix our problem? she said.

Do I really need to do the procedure?

My friend was trying to work out what role human action has in seeing God work.

The story of Jesus feeding the crowd in Mark chapter 6 can help us here. We may know

how the story ends. Thousands of people are miraculously fed with just a little bread and some

fish. But notice who is to feed the crowd? The disciples. And who provides the food? They do. Who

distributes the food and cleans up afterward? The disciples.

You give them something to eat, Jesus said. Jesus did the miracle, but it happened as the disciples

acted. A good crop is a gift from God, but a farmer must still work the land. In Luke chapter 5, Jesus promised

Peter a catch of fish, but the fishermen still had to cast his nets. God contend the earth

and do miracles without us, but typically chooses to work in a divine human partnership.

My friend went through with the procedure and later successfully conceived.

While this is no formula for a miracle, it was a lesson for my friend and me. God often does

his miraculous work through the methods he's placed in our hands.

Today's scripture reading is from Mark 6, verses 35 to 44.

By this time it was late in the day, so his disciples came to him.

This is a remote place, they said, and it's already very late.

Send the people away so they can go to the surrounding

countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat. But he answered,

...