My sister, Beth, is serving in Caracas, Venezuela. She and her team live in a barrio outside of the city. It is poor and violent. Their goal is to be a presence of peace and comfort and healing in their neighborhood. I want to tell you one of her stories.

This week, she and 2 team members were sitting in their office. Gun shots rang out on the street. When they ran outside they saw a man lying in the street. Neighbors cautiously came out of their homes. A group of firefighters happened to be driving by a few minutes later and rushed the man to the hospital. Someone thinks he was from the apartments at the base of their hill and was buying drugs in their neighborhood. No one knows who shot him. Most likely no one will ever know. They may never even know why. Violence is common, random and severe in their tiny part of the world. There are very few old men in their community. The chances of them living that long are slim because of the myriad forces that assault them and pressure them and tempt them every single hour of every day. In conditions like this it is almost laughable to talk about "making good choices" - most of these youth do not have any good choices.

Beth watched as they loaded the wounded man into the Jeep and drove away. She walked back into the office, numb with anger, fear and helplessness. This is not the time when you hope your energetic, extroverted adolescent neighbor will stop by unannounced. But R has a knack for timing. He bounced over to Beth and asked if she wanted to bake something.  Bake something? My sister, having a deep love for this boy, could not say no but told him to come back in an hour. He would forget anyway. And so she reflected on her experience of this violence in solitude for the next hour, at which point R promptly returned, this time with his cousin M.

So they baked.

They made chocolate banana bread. My sister and two teenage boys mashing and stirring and generally getting the place messy. The ingredients came together. The boys laughed. Beth directed. In a world where everything around them could be destroyed in seconds they were not destroying. They were creating. And it was a delight. At the end all they had to show for it was a loaf of mediocre banana bread. But they had something to show.  Beth could not have been more grateful for that spontaneous act of amateur baking.

God's answers to our most intense questions rarely seem satisfactory. In the midst of a world where young men are gunned down in their prime every day we get down on our knees and cry out - "do something!" as we pound a fist on the floor. It is the way of God to respond with banana bread. Jesus slept on the boat when his disciples were being tossed by the storm. He delayed for several days after his friend Lazarus died. He hung on the cross as hecklers tempted him to save himself.

And somehow he remains victorious. It is the devil who wanted the impressive: jump from the top of the temple to be swooped up by attending angels. But God's great victories are even more incredible because they are found in the most unlikely places and unlikely people - the washing of feet, wine at a wedding feast and two teenage boys and one small loaf of banana bread.