The Casserole on the Doorstep

In 2018, a family in Greenville, South Carolina found their mailbox smashed and racial slurs spray-painted across their garage door. The Hendersons had moved into the neighborhood only three weeks earlier. Police filed a report. Neighbors whispered. Most people would have put the house back on the market.

Instead, Angela Henderson baked a casserole. Not for her own family — for every house on the block. Twelve foil pans of her grandmother's chicken and rice recipe, each one with a handwritten note: "We're glad to be your neighbors." She didn't know which door to blame. She knocked on all of them anyway.

Within a month, a retired contractor from two houses down showed up with paint to cover the slurs. A teenager across the street started mowing their lawn without being asked. The man who later admitted to the vandalism — a sixty-three-year-old widower drowning in bitterness — sat on Angela's porch that December, eating pecan pie and weeping.

"I didn't forgive him because he deserved it," Angela told her pastor. "I forgave him because carrying hate was going to crush me before it ever touched him."

Jesus doesn't ask us to love our enemies because they've earned it. He asks because the measure we use — whether generosity or grudge, casserole or clenched fist — is the same measure that gets poured back into our own laps, pressed down and overflowing.