If you peek around my kitchen, currently perched in a wooden basket on top of the microwave, you will find an empty mason jar. This jar has moved around the kitchen quite a lot the last few months. For a while it was sitting next to my sink, it’s clear glass catching the light and reflecting it onto the bottle of blue Dawn dish soap. When the counter got cluttered, I moved the mason jar to the ledge above the toaster next to my water bottle. For a while I even wedged it into my cluttered and overstuffed baking cupboard. –Until the day I snatched it to safety before it almost tipped out and smashed.
The other empty glass jars; the store-bought ones that once held spaghetti sauce, olives or salsa, they are treated differently. Once emptied, those jars are rinsed out, de-labled, run through the dishwasher and then swiftly taken out with the other recyclables. Those are mere commercial jars, designed to be part of the system where they can easily be melted down and reused again. I have no emotional attachment to those jars whatsoever. — But I can’t bring myself to put this empty mason jar out with the other recyclable glass. So it sits, gathering dust, as an empty useless container, only preserving its own potential.
Perhaps it is the personal nature of the thing. This particular mason jar once held homemade strawberry jam, a parting gift from a generous friend who was moving away. It took us a long time to use all of the jam up; but it was delicious, smeared on toast along with some Kerrygold butter. Once emptied, I took the handwritten sticker off of the mason jar, rinsed and then dishwashered it. And then the jar just sat, all lonely and empty in my kitchen, just waiting to be filled up with something good to be given away again. –This is the purpose of a mason jar. It holds the product from the hands of friends, each of those berries individually picked, washed, detopped, chopped, smashed, mixed and cooked with sugar and lemon juice before being given away with love.
For each of us is like an empty mason jar. We each have the capacity to carefully fill our lives with many wonderful and good things. We gather individual berries of beauty, kindness, hope, joy and peace that we find in various corners of our daily existence. From the thrill of seeing baby rabbits prancing and sprinting through our flowerbeds to the deep peace and satisfaction of watching our baby sleep, we can gather all of those sweet moments and cook them together into a delicious lifetime of memories and experiences. But those moments are not meant to simply be hoarded on a personal shelf in the shadowed root cellar of our past; they are meant to be lovingly shared with others like a gift of homemade strawberry jam. The kind relationships and loving care that we can spread with our lives is something that sustains the hearts of our friends and families. It can and does, in an incremental but significant way, further God’s kingdom of love, joy and peace in the world.
May we all choose to fill every corner of the containers that God has given us, every year and hour, with our own personal and delectable recipe for life; and then give it all away. Amen.
Article Published in Rockford Squire Newspaper May 2, 2024
