When my wife makes soup, (and I do my best to get her to make soup as often as possible,) our house is filled with the smell of wonderful seasonings and flavors. When I come home and open the door and the aroma of that soup greets my senses, I smile inside knowing soup is on the menu. I like soup. Always have. I think soup is supposed to be really healthy for you, especially like vegetable soup.

Sometimes, when we go out to a restaurant, I’ll even order soup. But, even when the soup I order at a restaurant is really delicious, it somehow just doesn’t measure up to my wife’s soup. I usually say to her “This restaurant soup is pretty good, but it’s not as good as yours.” It’s not the way she cuts the vegetables, or stews up the meat, or the spices she uses that makes her soup so fabulous.

There’s one ingredient that she always stirs in. As she stands over that stove, she patiently takes her wooden spoon and stirs. And as she stirs … love becomes an incredible and invisible ingredient. Somehow, I can tell just by the taste … there’s love in her soup.

I’m going through my ‘read the bible in a year’ plan again this year. I’ve been noticing, as I read every morning, that God is the best storyteller in the universe.  I’ve read the stories a thousand times in His book, but I never cease to be amazed at how ‘stirring’ His stories are. And how He patiently stirs the story lines of those characters in His book. Noah, Abraham, Lot, Ezra, Nehemiah, David, Jonah. It’s almost as if God included the names and personalities of those characters, and the particulars of their lives to remind us of an important reality: God has always been in our soup.

If we imagine our lives as a cauldron of events that are happenstance coincidences that occur in random order and without structure or meaning? We miss the point of life, entirely. From the very beginning, God has taken his mighty finger and stirred the pot of life for every person he ever created. And one ingredient that is never missing from that stirring … is love.

When I notice that God’s in my soup,

I become more aware of His hand, touching and stirring my life;

I notice people I encounter,

Opportunities that come my way.

I see circumstances in a totally different light;

When I acknowledge that God is in my soup.

Because God is in my soup,

He’s patiently simmering my character,

Tenderizing my tough muscles of self and pride.

When I am aware that God is in my soup,

(And as a child of God, He is always in my soup,)

He not only stirs every element I need,

He, himself enters my stony heart, and changes me,

From the inside out.

The aroma in the kitchen of our lives and souls makes even the angels hungry, I think,

for a taste of God’s glory;

Never been a sweeter perfume,

Than the aroma of true soul-food that rises from

The reality of God’s finger in my soup.

Eph. 5:2 in the New Living translation says, “Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.”

Because of Jesus … my soup has love in it. How about yours?