I had a moment the other day while I was pulling meat off a rotisserie chicken to make soup.
It wasn’t a particularly good looking bird. Not plump. Not appetizing. Not aromatic. But I knew that if I looked far enough, there was good meat to be had.
I didn’t really want to look at it, or think about the rubbery skin, the squishing fat, or the soft gristle as I ran my fingers over every bone, pulling off the good parts that I’d never find if I only looked for it.
Any little bit into the soup was going to be worth it. The soup needed as much meat as possible to pack it with nutrition for my sick family. So I took my time and swallowed my slight revulsion at what I had to work my fingers into before I got to the good stuff.
At one point it popped into my head…
This must be how God feels trying to find the good little bits of my character, or the meritorious parts of my days.
Its not that its mostly terrible, though some parts surely are. Just that there’s a lot of waste that fully surrounds the good juicy healthy morsels.
Thankfully, He takes the time!
We know that God can make the best of the worst situations and bring about goodness where much is lacking. That’s what I was trying to do with this chicken in making it into soup. And I think that must be a very similar view God has when picking over my days.
It made me take my time. To really get everything I could that had any potential of adding flavor or nutrients from those bones.
After all, I can only pray that God takes his time to find all the good parts of me, and that he counts up every last one carefully.
Of course, any good parts of me are from God, so he won’t waste them. And any good parts of that chicken were from God, so I didn’t waste that either.