ou'll recognize the above text taken from the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. The story is truly a miraculous experience of how Christ can take a little boy's lunch and turn it into a banquet feast of multiplied thousands. The story also shows what we as Christ's followers can do if we would simply place our dreams and aspirations in Christ's hand.

Unfortunately, there's another aspect of this story that we Christians overlook, a life lesson that was driven home to me in a personal experience.

During this past summer my wife and I visited the Community Praise Center (CPC), an Adventist church in Alexandria, Virginia. During the service pastor Henry Wright made a special appeal. A CPC associate pastor traveled to Uganda for a short-term mission trip, and the church was collecting old and used Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guides and other Sabbath school materials. Pastor Wright said the literature was often used to study with people who are preparing for baptism.

After hearing the appeal, I was deeply impressed to get involved in the project, though I was not a member. After all, I work at the Adventist world headquarters. Maybe I could find one or two study guides around the office. After talking with a few people, I located a few adult study guides and some children's materials. Soon I had a boxful of brand-new materials that just were on shelves collecting dust, not being used.

The next step was to get others involved in collecting used guides. The boxes started to mount: two, three, four, and more. Then I made a phone call to someone I knew at a church publishing house. To my amazement, I found out that a supply of more than 3,000 outdated study guides was about to be discarded. Fortunately, the CPC acquired the materials before they were abandoned.

You would think that the story would stop here; it gets even better. A local Adventist Book Center just happened to have nearly 100 guides that it was about to discard and was happy to donate to the project. Two weeks after hearing the appeal, I attended my home church. As providence would have it, I ended up sitting on the same row with the Sabbath school superintendent. After mentioning the literature project, he told me that he had some materials to contribute. After church he took me to one of the children's Sabbath school rooms, where we prepared six boxes of materials.

By this time I was flabbergasted and began to wonder, If my own church had six boxes of unused outdated literature, how much more truth-filled literature is stored away, collecting dust in Adventist churches? To answer my question I decided to call one of the 50-plus Adventist churches in the Baltimore-Washington area and found three more boxes of unused Sabbath school materials.

I'm amazed at the wealth of resources the Adventist Church has at its disposal. Operating more than 50 publishing houses around the world, the church produces millions of pieces of literature each year. Unfortunately, too often that literature never reaches those who need it most. Instead, you'll find it stored on pallets in warehouses, stacked on shelves in offices, or tucked in file cabinets in some churches.

While there are legitimate reasons for this situation, such as high shipping costs that often make mass distribution prohibitive, or soft currency in some economies that puts the cost of literature out of reach for people in developing countries, still it's a tragedy that there are enormous quantities of unused Sabbath school materials, Bible study lessons, or other materials, lying dormant while thousands of people in developing countries count it a privilege to own a single Sabbath school study guide or Bible lesson.

Like the members of Community Praise Center, perhaps your congregation would like to send used Sabbath school literature and other resources to our members overseas. The need is great, and it's high time that each of us helps bridge the resource gap by recycling our literature.

To help churches recycle their literature, the Adventist Review has set up a list of literature requests on its Web site at www.adventistreview.org/2004-1539/literature.html.

Let's gather the fragments so that nothing is lost.

_________________________
Carlos Medley is the online editor of the Adventist Review.