Nourishing hearts as faithfully as we nourish our tables.
Welcome to Season & Savor Sunday — because feeding our bodies is not enough.
I’ve been making soups. In August. In Colorado. When it’s still hitting the mid-nineties most afternoons.
I don’t know what that says about me, except maybe that I’m ready. Ready for sweater weather, ready for the oven to run all day without heating up the whole house, ready for the particular kind of quiet that comes when summer finally lets go.
But if I’m honest, the soup isn’t really about the heat. It’s about missing something I didn’t expect to miss.
Both of our boys are grown and gone now. We just drove our youngest back up to his place to finish out his final semester of grad school. Our oldest flew in for a weekend with his buddies, fantasy football of all things. We picked him up from the airport, and on his way back Sunday morning, he stopped by for a few minutes. A few minutes. I’ll take it.
Here’s what surprised me this year. I don’t miss the chaos of those school mornings. The lost shoes, the forgotten permission slip, the “we have to leave in five minutes” while somebody’s still eating cereal standing up at the counter. The running to practices and scrambling to try and get a hot meal on the table in between. I do not miss that.
But I miss the structure that chaos rode in on. The rhythm of it. Lunches packed the night before. A schedule that told me where everyone needed to be and when. There was a kind of order underneath all that noise, and I didn’t realize how much I leaned on it until it was gone.
Now that we’re empty nesters again, there’s a strange mix of joy and change, held in the same hand. It would be easy to just fill our schedules back up with more work. The harder thing is finding the new rhythm of this stage of life.
The Bible says it plainly. “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33, NIV).
I love that verse because it doesn’t say God removes the noise. It says He isn’t the author of it. Underneath whatever chaos we’re living through, God’s nature is order. Peace. A rhythm that holds even when our own schedules fall apart.
Maybe that’s what I’m really craving this season. Not the taxi-driving, not the rushed mornings. Just the reminder that even in an empty house, even with grown kids scattered and a slower pace I’m still getting used to, God hasn’t stopped ordering things. He’s just doing it in a season I don’t recognize yet.
And if you’re the one still packing lunches tonight, still rushing out the door tomorrow morning, still trying to get something decent into hungry bellies before the bell rings, I see you. That season is a gift too, even on the days it doesn’t feel like one. You won’t miss the chaos. But one day you might miss the noise.
So I’ll keep making soup before it’s soup weather. Not because it’s time, but because I’m learning to trust the One who is not a God of chaos, even when my calendar looks nothing like it used to.
What season are you in right now? I’d love to hear where you’re finding God’s order in the middle of the chaos.
~ With grace at the table, and beyond
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