I don’t mean to be flippant with this title, but there are moments in life when reality hits you between the eyes — sometimes between the lips — and those moments often impact me during communion.

When that morsel of bread contacts the tongue, yields to being pierced and broken and crushed, the reality of what it represents can be almost too much to bear.

Then it goes inside and becomes a part of us, giving energy and life … it’s bread, the staff of life, you know … and it gives us life to remind us that Jesus wants to live within us and give us life. Not just stingy morsels of life, but abundant life; eternal life. Life to be fully lived, by turning it over to Him.

He serves us this bread, which is Himself. He reminds us that to live life fully, abundantly, you serve others and you serve them yourself.

Then He pours out His blood for us, and we remember it in small measure through the cup. It courses through us and becomes a part of us. It gives us that life, just as it gave Him life when it coursed through His veins, in a way we’ll perhaps never fully understand in this life. But the measure is enough for us to understand that in serving others and serving them ourselves, a small measure may be all we can give but it is never enough; to be like Him, it must be all or nothing at all.

All the body must be given over to service to others; all the blood in the heart; all the will of the mind; all the devotion of the soul. And when we have fed even the least of these, we have fed Him.

It is a reality that bites and gnaws and yearns for us wholly in the tiny morsels of bread and sips from the cup.

But it is His reality.

And it outlasts, outloves and outlives any other.