The Soup That Outlasted the Sermon

When Dorothy Henderson died at ninety-three in Macon, Georgia, nearly four hundred people filled the sanctuary at First Baptist. The pastor admitted he was stunned. Dorothy had never taught a class, never led a committee, never sang in the choir. She could not quote Romans chapter by chapter or parse the Greek behind agape.

What Dorothy could do was show up at your door with a pot of chicken soup on the worst day of your life.

She brought soup when Marcus Williams lost his job at the paper mill. She brought soup when the Nguyen family arrived from Vietnam speaking almost no English. She brought soup — and sat quietly for two hours — when sixteen-year-old Jamie Dawson came home from the hospital after a suicide attempt, and nobody in the church knew what to say.

Dorothy never posted about it. She never mentioned it in prayer request time. Her name appeared on no plaques. She simply528 loved people in the most ordinary, stubborn, repetitive way imaginable — one quart at a time, for sixty years.

Paul told the Corinthians that eloquent speech without love is just clanging metal. That prophecy and knowledge and mountain-moving faith, without love, amount to nothing. Dorothy Henderson never moved a mountain. But she fed a town, one broken heart at a time, and four hundred people stood to say that was enough. Love never fails. It never has.