In his book Love Does, Bob Goff states that “love is never stationary in the end. Love doesn’t just keep thinking about it or keep planning for it. Simply put: love does!”. I believe this is SO true when you are thinking about showing love to others. It took me almost three decades to learn this but when you need to show love, you don’t have to plan it, schedule it or think about it too much. You just have to go and show it. Whatever it is that you need to do to show someone that you love them (like cooking a meal), you go and do it.
It took a group of moms and dads providing me and my family with meals for me to experience this. Most of you are familiar with Meal Trains. For those of you that aren’t, a meal train gets together a group of individuals to provide meals to someone in need. I didn’t even know this was a thing until I started joining mom groups and hanging out with other moms. In Puerto Rico, where I am from, this is not a tradition we follow. But boy, am I glad it is here!
The weeks after having our twins were hard. There was a lot of healing I needed to do combined with a lot of feedings, laundry and toddler entertaining we all had to do as well. In the middle of it all, we were blessed with friends and acquaintances that decided to provide us meals. Twenty-four of them to be exact. We had store-bought and home-cooked dinners. We had people that used a meal delivery service and people that not only provided us dinner but breakfast, snacks and dessert, too. We had a wide variety of foods from casseroles, to pizza, to Mexican, Cuban and Italian meals. All these meals were different but they all had one thing in common. They were all delivered with love. It was that love that made the meals so much more good and special.
These 24 men and women decided not to let love be stationary. They decided that they were going to show us love and went ahead and did it. To some of them, it might have been just a meal but it made me feel like I was being seen and loved.
To everyone that blessed us with the best meals ever, THANK YOU. There are no words to express how much your gifts, your texts, your calls, your visits, your words of encouragement and, yes, your meal meant to us. You showed up and loved us in the most humble and sweet way. My heart will be forever in debt to you all. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
