soup day

“Let me tell you my God story,” my mom says over the phone, and immediately I hear the difference in her voice, how burden falls and crumbles, how joy swells. She laughs, an eternal, ageless sound. I’m driving, and still I sit forward a little in my seat, anticipating. It can be easy, in sharing stories, to misidentify the hero. Mom says it plain, reiterating: “Let me tell you what God has done today.”

I can’t help but smile, imagining the record in heavenly history: We remember the activity of God, and God remembers when we share our stories of Him with each other.

“Oh, please do,” I say, and I am part here and part there, walking with my mom into that little island grocery store in the early morning, through that parking lot, our feet skirting the rainy wading pool near the road. Sabal palms rustle.

Mom has gone just for the basics—eggs, milk, that sort of thing, during the early hours of less crowded aisles, while the light is new and most of the island still sleeps. She wears her mask, a bright, cheerful thing–brighter still against her olive skin–with strings tied in bows around her ears. Her downy white hair, smooth and always shining, has begun to go blond in wide streaks on each side of her head, as though in remembrance of her girlhood.

“So, I get all that stuff, and then suddenly, I feel like I need to make a big pot of vegetable soup,” she says. “Out of the blue, and I don’t know why, but I just know I need to make some.”

I imagine Mom turning her shopping cart back for another lap around the store, the complaint of its rusty wheels, the lean of her body as she reaches for favorite ingredients.

When the Holy Spirit leads, it’s often like this, a certainty settles, an idea so specific and utterly unexpected that we become simultaneously aware of its otherness and its authority. In that moment, we choose either to obey even in the seemingly small things, propelled by faith and the desire to participate in the divine, or to dismiss that sudden certainty as absurdity. I’m being crazy, we think maybe. Maybe you think this is crazy now. A little silly, that God would want Mom to make a pot of vegetable soup? No, not crazy, not silly, but in the dismissal, maybe just a little forgetful: Jesus fed 5000 people with a little boy’s lunch.

“I get home and tell your dad, ‘I need to make some vegetable soup,'” she’s saying, “and he says, ‘Oo-kay.'” She chuckles, because it’s a peculiar thing to be so led by God. You walk one way and then feel the divine hand clasp your own and turn you in a new direction. Mom had other things in mind for the morning, a list she’s always rehearsing in her head, and then suddenly, the soup.

I imagine her in the kitchen, slippers on her veiny feet, stirring a steaming, simmering stew with crinkled hand, her knuckles swollen, her fingers bent crooked with arthritis. I hear the smile in her voice, the beam of the never-aging soul shedding all the temporality of useless, misguided definitions. God says it’s soup day, and so it is. Mom laughs, telling me how, when the soup is done, her neighbor calls. They spent the night in the ER, neighbor and husband, after husband fell and broke his hip a second time. Neighbor wasn’t there; husband lay for hours in pain without a way to call for help. Neighbor has come home, exhausted and hungry, trying to gather her wits to return to husband at the hospital. On the phone, neighbor sounds empty.

“I made some soup,” Mom says in reply. “I’ll bring some to you.”

Mom laughs again, telling me how suddenly that day she knows to call a grieving friend. Friend and daughter have just buried husband and father and come home, crushed and laid bare, to an emptier, colder house. Mom knows not to ask what they need or how she can help.

“I made some soup,” Mom tells them over the phone. “I’ll bring some to you.”

“But maybe we can come get it, instead?” They ask. They need a visit, a bit of healing somewhere warmer and not so immediately steeped in suffering.

And so it goes, the story of how God feeds hungry and hurting people, his beloved, with a pot of soup and the arms of woman who physically feels every year of her age, who inwardly finds herself newer all the time. It becomes a refrain–“I made some soup; I’ll bring some to you,” and somehow, as God tends, He makes more than enough of simple obedience.

“You know,” I say to Mom, grinning wide to match her smile, “it just serves to remind: God prepares good work for us to do in advance.

“Yes,” she agrees, and again, she laughs.