The Little Red Hen Meets a Blessing

This afternoon, the aromatic scent of lasagna and garlic bread nearly overwhelmed my senses as dinner baked in the oven. I’m normally a crockpot lasagna girl because I’m lazy and I can hide more vegetables between the layers of noodle and cheese (the longer it bakes, the more likely the kids are to forget the zucchini), but today we were taking dinner to someone else, so I made the real deal.

Needless to say, I was almost eating the air at one point, but I was also spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about the little red hen.

You may not have been raised on this fable, but my mom loved to tease us girls with this story. If you don’t know it, the gist is that the little red hen goes to make a loaf of bread and gives everyone the opportunity to help. Of course, no one does, and then they get upset with her when she won’t share the finished product. Let me tell you, it was a fun joke with my mom when I was a kid, but now that I’m a mom myself…I really feel that story in my gut.

You want to eat this dinner I slaved over? Then you best be helping wash the dishes.

Think this house is nice to live in? Here’s a rag and some vinegar. Go scrub your bathroom.

You want me to drive you where now? Alright, then get your granola bar wrappers out of my car and stop putting your grimy hands all over my windshield.

But the truth is: I’m not the little red hen. I wasn’t out there planting my own grain, harvesting it, threshing it, milling it, and baking it into bread, all on my lonesome. Not on a normal day, and not today either. It may be easy to trick myself into thinking that I did all the work for the meal we shared (I browned the meat, I opened the cans of tomato, I boiled the noodles), but I didn’t.

The cans of tomato sauce and boxes of lasagna noodles were given to me in August by my mother-in-awesome, who needed to clean out her pantry before a cross-country move.

The recipes were given to me by my mother (who faithfully made this meal on special occasions throughout my childhood, even though assembling a lasagna in an Asian island nation might not have been the easiest).

A friend mailed me dried oregano from her garden in Virginia, which I mixed in with the cottage cheese layer.

Half my children were playing at a neighbor’s house, which enabled me to have the brain space to put together an entire meal without repeated interruptions (no, you may not have a cookie before dinner!).

My eldest made cookies to send with the meal (in case it was horrible, I can only assume).

The middles set the table so that we could eat after we dropped the meal off.

Twinkle put pot holders on the table.

My husband sent me the contact information so that I knew where I was going and could drop the meal off at the right time (and technically his paycheck covered the Italian sausage, cheese, and disposable pans).

All this to say, the meal that I delivered tonight was not made in a vacuum. And that is a wonderful thing.

It’s wonderful not only because I had help (and I always need it), but because, without knowing it, all those people—both my moms, my friend, my neighbor, my kids, my husband, and probably more people than I can think of at present—got to be a part of the blessing that family received in the shape of a pan of gooey lasagna, a container of roasted green beans, a box of whole wheat chocolate chip cookies, and a loaf of braided garlic bread.

At some point, consciously or unconsciously, each one of these people made a choice—to share, to support, to encourage, to open their home, to serve, to bless—and weeks or months down the line that choice is still ricocheting around the world, providing a blessing for others…even without their knowledge.

Most of them could not hop in their car and drive a meal to that young family on their own, but their gifts enabled me to do so. Many of them wished they could’ve brought meals to our home while I was bringing home baby after baby after baby. Instead, today, they got to be a part of taking a meal to another young military family…without even realizing it.

That is an incredible thought to me.

It’s incredible because not only do I see that there was help there waiting for me when I needed it (if I knew how to look for it), but also because…for a brief moment…I got a glimpse of the ripple effect of blessing that originates from tiny pebbles thrown into the ocean of the world for no other reason sometimes than just the joy of it.