In Spanish, when more people come for a meal than you plan, you say you’ll “add more water to the beans.” Meaning you’ll use what you have, add what you need to stretch to meet the demand, and trust that God covers it. When we step into our God-given nature as inviters, we regularly find that God adds more water to the beans; He gives us what we need.
I am convinced that the way we are meant to “give back,” or to love those around us can be as vastly different and ever-changing as the sky outside of your window right now. There once was a time when I believed that there was a clear prescription for loving and being loved, with a measuring stick alongside of it to indicate how well I was adhering to Biblical standards. The longer I live, the longer it seems to me that God has a complex, beautiful purpose for various stages in our lives, as well as for the people who surround us at any given time.
In programming, the “source code” is the underlying architecture that makes a program or operating system work. It is what the programmer writes that is then compiled into the binary commands that make our devices function and our programs run. On one level, it is just row after row of commands, but, together, the effect is more than the sum of the parts. It gives the computer, tablet, or smartphone the instructions that allow them to “live” and do all the amazing things that they do.
Picking up blueberries beneath the high chair, I could feel warm tears well up in my eyes as my face grew flushed with raw emotion. (Italicized: Does what I am doing really matter? Does anyone know how hard I work? This work is hard and monotonous, with no extolment attached. Why God?) I asked my Jesus to help me in that moment. To help me with motherhood and life, as I transitioned into my new role as a stay-at-home mom.
Did you know that the verse at the center of the Torah—the first five books of the Bible that were the heart of spiritual life for Israel—is “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, NIV)? When the religious leaders asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment in the Law?” he said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39, NIV).