Every weekday morning, I heat up soup for my sons’ school lunches. I pour the soup carefully into each thermos, twist on the cap, insert the spoons, add a few snacks, and zip the lunch boxes closed.
Before I put the soup in my older son’s thermos, though, I always scoop out the carrots. It takes an extra minute or two to take them out, but I have watched him eat the soup many times. He enthusiastically eats the chicken and the noodles and the other veggies, but he leaves the carrots behind. He’s never once complained about the carrots. I just know he doesn’t like them.
As I’m making his lunch, I like to picture him eating lunch in the cafeteria. He and his friends have their masks off for the first time all day, and they’re laughing together and telling jokes the way middle school boys do. Maybe they’re playing catch with a granola bar. Maybe they’re talking about how boring social studies was today.
I smile thinking he probably won’t notice that there are no carrots, but he might enjoy his lunch just a little bit more.
It’s such a simple thing. And, I suppose there are people who would argue that I should leave the carrots. Why shouldn’t he pick them out himself or – better yet – eat them? But I’m not that kind of mother. There are enough miserable and difficult problems I can’t prevent from affecting my children. I personally like carrots, but not everyone does. If I can do this one small task to make my son’s lunch and life a little more pleasant, why wouldn’t I? So, even when I’m in a hurry, I take out the carrots.
I believe God does that for us, too – frequently. He steps in to make a situation a little easier, adds a moment of beauty to a rough day or places a kind stranger in your path. You’re running late for an appointment, and he makes sure there’s an empty parking spot right out front. You drop your bag of groceries, and the eggs don’t crack. Your child takes a scary-looking tumble and jumps up unhurt and smiling. A storm ends, and a beautiful rainbow fills the sky.
God knows our wants and hopes and needs better than we know them ourselves. Sometimes we discover his love in enormous gestures, like when welcoming a new baby, celebrating the union of a couple in marriage or witnessing the consecration of bread and wine into his body and blood at Mass. But he also steps in and eases our burdens in small ways we might not ever see. That’s how much he loves us.
“Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger or higher or wider; nothing is more pleasant, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth,” said St. Thomas à Kempis, “for love is born of God and cannot rest except in God, who is above all created things.”
During the month of February, as we reflect on love, perhaps we can think about how much God loves us and how he demonstrates this to us in so many ways every day. In the great soup of life, God so often picks out the carrots just to make us smile.
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