The Hot Sauce Sermon

We're in the thick of summer here in North Texas, where the weather app has apparently forgotten there are numbers below 100°. By late July, my garden isn't exactly thriving.

It's waving the white flag.

The tomatoes are wearing the evidence of another brutal Texas summer. Sun-scalded shoulders. Split skins. The tomatoes are all but getting cooked on the vine. The peppers aren't much better, sporting little sunburns that make them look far worse than they really are.

If I were selling produce at a farmers market, these beauties would definitely be overlooked or tossed in the trash.

But a homesteader sees things a little differently.

I wasn't about to let weeks of watering, weeding, and tending this garden end in the compost pile just because the vegetables had a really rough week of extreme temps. So I gathered everything that was left on the vine.

The pretty tomatoes. The ugly tomatoes. The tomatoes that were sun burned.

The peppers that had simply spent a little too much time under the relentless Texas sun.

Sure, they weren't beautiful enough for a fresh summer salad. But they were still full of flavor. So into the pot they went.

A couple cups of 5% white vinegar. A tablespoon of salt. Half a cup of sugar. Tomatoes. Peppers. Onions. Garlic. The whole colorful harvest simmered away until everything softened into something wonderfully fragrant.

Then the stick blender gave it its best shot, but the Vitamix had to come in and finish the job, transforming what looked like a pile of garden misfits into a smooth, rich Louisiana-style hot sauce.

Twenty minutes in the water bath canner, and suddenly those scarred vegetables had become beautiful rows of ruby-red jars lining my countertop.

As I stood there filling jars, I realized my hot sauce had quietly been preaching a sermon all morning.

Those tomatoes were never ruined. They were simply transformed.

If I had judged them by their scars, I would have missed what they were becoming.

How often do we do that with ourselves?

Life leaves its marks on us. We get bruised by disappointment, scorched by hardship, and worn down by seasons we never would have chosen. We spend so much energy asking God to erase the evidence of our pain that we forget He often uses those very places to shape us into someone we never could have become otherwise.

Throughout Scripture, God has always specialized in redeeming what others overlook. Moses doubted his own ability to speak. David was the shepherd no one expected to become king. Rahab carried a past that many would have written off. Peter denied Jesus. Paul bore scars from a life spent following Christ.

None of them were flawless. Every one of them was faithful because God was at work in them.

The garden reminded me that scars don't always subtract from something's value.

Sometimes they deepen it.

Without the scorching Texas summer, this hot sauce would never have existed.

Without some of the hardest seasons of my own life, I wouldn't know the faithfulness of God the way I do today.

I've discovered something standing over a pot of homemade hot sauce. The scarred tomatoes didn't make the sauce despite their scars. They helped make it because they'd endured the heat.

Maybe that's true for us, too.

Maybe the places you've begged God to erase are the very places He's using to season your life with compassion, perseverance, wisdom, and grace.

God has never been in the business of wasting broken things. He redeems them.

And if He can turn a basket of sun-scorched tomatoes and peppers into something worth sharing, imagine what He can do with a life that's been placed in His hands.

"And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good,^[a] for those who are called according to his purpose."  Romans 8:28 (ESV)