The miracle of the fish and the bread was real to me
The miracle of 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread is one of my favorite stories. There they were in numbers of thousands of people who personally got to be in the physical presence of Jesus, God-incarnate, and got fed well by Him. Well, too bad that I wasn’t born 2,000 years ago in the region of Galilee to experience this.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to know what fish those people ate back then. I looked up the original Greek text in the Gospel to see if I could get clues. Unfortunately, it didn’t indicate exactly what fish it was, but I did find out on the internet that tilapia is a well-known fish from the Sea of Galilee, where the miracle took place. Thus, I thought it would be a possibility that the miracle fish could have been tilapia. Galilee is a popular destination spot, and I imagined I would one day visit Israel and eat this local specialty.
A few days after this, a friend who was living in Bangkok came to Chiang Mai for a visit when we were living in Thailand and stayed with us. He was studying at a culinary school, Cordon Bleu, in Bangkok. One day during his stay, he wanted to cook us dinner. He and my husband went grocery shopping for all the ingredients. After they came back, I asked him what he was making, and he replied, “Tilapia.” I thought, “What a coincidence.. haha!” because I had just learned that tilapia is well-known in Galilee. I asked him if he needed help with anything, and he asked me if I could blend mango and yogurt in the blender. I pressed the button until the mango and yogurt became a “velvety texture,” as he requested.
This delicious, fine-dining-looking tilapia in a beautiful presentation with mango sauce was served meticulously there. As I took a few bites, I thought, “Cordon Bleu must be a very good school. It’s delicious… I think this tilapia would go well with rice…”. I dug the tilapia with my fork and saw a piece of bread underneath the fish. Woah! It was fish and bread just like the story, not fish and rice, not fish and pasta, not fish and vegetables… but fish and bread!! Is this a coincidence? It was too exact and timely to be a coincidence just a few days after I was intently thinking about the miracle of the fish and bread.
The next day, I wanted to sketch a tilapia for jewelry. I googled tilapia and clicked on the first image I was drawn to, leading me to a Wikipedia page, “mango tilapia.” To my fascination, this specific tilapia, “mango tilapia,” is also known as “ Galilee St. Peter’s fish” from the Sea of Galilee. Because the dish I ate was tilapia with mango sauce or ‘mango tilapia’, I know for sure that this was a nice gift from the Lord, packed with His lovely, sweet, perfect sense of humor. Well, this verse comes to my mind. Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalms 37:4) Indeed, he did give me the desire of my heart in a humorous way because I also wanted to experience the miracle of the fish and the bread. Perhaps, I experienced it this way so that this story could be told to others.
Check out the fish necklace inspired from the miracle of the fish and the bread