The Last Recipe Maria Santos Ever Wrote

When Maria Santos of San Antonio learned her cancer was terminal in 2019, she didn't spend her remaining weeks making phone calls or writing letters. She cooked. Every Sunday for two months, she gathered her four children and eleven grandchildren around her kitchen table and prepared her mother's tamales, her abuela's arroz con pollo, her own famous tres leches cake.

But Maria did something her family didn't expect. She placed a small notebook beside her cutting board and wrote down every measurement, every technique, every substitution she'd learned across forty years of feeding the people she loved. "When you make this," she told her granddaughter Sofia, "I'll be right here at this table with you."

Maria understood what Jesus knew on the night He broke bread with His disciples in that upper room. A meal shared with intention becomes more than food. It becomes covenant. It becomes presence.

When Jesus lifted ordinary unleavened bread and said, "This is my body," He was transforming the familiar into the sacred. When He passed the cup and called it "my blood of the covenant, poured out for many," He was ensuring that every time His followers gathered at a table, He would be there with them.

Maria's family still makes her recipes every Sunday. And every time they do, she is with them. How much more is Christ present when we break bread in His name — not merely in memory, but in the living reality of His promise.