Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. — 1 Corinthians 12:7 MSG
There is a children’s story called “Stone Soup.” Perhaps you have read it before. A passerby sets up a big cooking pot in the middle of a village and lights a fire. There’s nothing in it other than water and a couple of rocks at the bottom. When the villagers walk by and ask what he is making, he says with delight, “Stone soup,” and ladles out some of the water. Tasting it, he says, “You know, what we could use is some cabbage.” The villager says, “I have some cabbage,” and throws it in. Later, another villager walks by and is told, after the chef ladles out some more soup and tastes it, “You know, what we need is some carrots.” You know where this ends already; the soup becomes a delicious simmering pot made up of everyone’s contributions and the entire village is fed. The concept is beautiful: we all need to throw in what we’ve got and it will be enough.
When I think of stone soup, I think of potluck meals. Potlucks were popular with farmers in the 1800s. They would bring and trade vegetables and various other things they had grown.
In more modern times, we often organize what we’ll each bring to a potluck. For example, by assigning alphabet letters. If your last name starts with the letters A through G, you bring a salad. If it starts with H through P, you bring the entrée. If it is Q through U, you bring a dessert, and if it’s V through Z, you bring a bag of chips. It’s a bad way to organize a dinner and a bad way to include people. Think about it. Why would you want a college kid to make the entrée? Or the Le Cordon Bleu chef to bring a bag of chips? In the same way, why would we want the person who is great with adults to serve preschoolers or the person with the winsome, childlike faith to be stuck in a board meeting?
God has created us to come together and form a beautiful community that highlights what we have each been given and can contribute.
Ask the people around you, “What are you good at? What lights you up and makes you spring out of bed?”
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Decorate Your Life with Whimsy
“Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” — Matthew 21:40–41
Most of us have a place we call home, whether we own a house or condo or are renting or living in a rustic cabin in the woods. We make changes to our homes to make them feel more like ours. We hang a painting from a nail or put up a couple of posters with thumb tacks. Maybe we install a rack in the kitchen to hold our pots and pans. I have a friend who did some big renovations on her home, but she did it without telling her landlord. The improvements were awesome and delighted my friend, but evidently didn’t delight the landlord. Where was the tree that used to be where the shed is? Who added the fence? Who removed the hedge?
Here’s the thing. In life, whether we are paying rent or paying a mortgage, we are still the tenants. It’s not our place; it’s God’s. If we want to move the furniture around a little, no problem. But before we start remodeling the house and repurposing what we are caretaking, we need to get permission from the owner.
How do you know what you have permission to change in your life? The answer is both simple and hard. We have permission to love and forgive and engage and be obedient and to be wise and kind. We might not have permission to build fences to separate ourselves from others. We also might not have permission to build a shed and store up things God would rather have us put into play.
Jesus doesn’t need pictures of Him hung on the walls. He would rather we decorate our lives and our hearts with compassion and empathy and generosity and joy and with, yes, a touch of whimsy.
This is what a good tenant would do.
- Love, hope, and patience are always the best kind of accents to our lives.
What can you do today to decorate your life with more of these?
Excerpted with permission from Catching Whimsy by Bob Goff, copyright Bob Goff.
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Your Turn
What are you bringing to the potluck? What do you do best? Every single one of us can bring our love, hope, and patience. Let’s practice today! ~ Devotionals Daily
