A Can of Beans

I attended a church dinner and tasted the best salad I had ever eaten.  I could have eaten it with a spoon and just ignored whatever else was on the table.  It was a bean salad, and I had to meet with the woman who put it together.

“It’s a combination of various beans,” the young mother told me.  “It is very easy, and the recipe is on the back of the can of beans.”  I made a mental note to buy the specific can of beans.

A week later the young woman stopped me at church and presented me with a can of beans.  I thanked her and left with the most wonderful feeling about her.

Two or so months later I heard that through an accident the young woman had broken her pelvic bone and was bedridden.  With a husband and two pre-teen children I knew life would be difficult for her.  So I prepared a complete meal, and I added a big stack of homemade flour tortillas.  A week later I took her another stack of flour tortillas and cookies.  I also told her that I favored the tortillas because it was so easy to make a meal by just placing something like a scrambled egg or sausage or just about anything in the tortilla and folding it.  Presto, a meal.  She said they had come to realize that and were so grateful to me.

Isn’t it amazing how far a can of beans can take you?