They Asked What the Boy Liked
The word for Saturday, August 8, 2026 is They Asked What the Boy Liked.
The anchor verses are Matthew 1:21 and Psalm 139:2.
Soren turned eleven this summer. He has autism, and the thing he loves most in the year is trick-or-treating. The costume. The walking. The doors.
His birthday falls in the middle of July.
So his mother, Leah Farrow, posted a question in her neighborhood group in Alabama. Would anybody be willing to answer their door for one afternoon in the middle of summer, so her son could trick-or-treat on his birthday.
She was expecting maybe a handful of people to say yes.
Eighty three families said yes.
Then she made them an offer. She would buy all the candy herself and drop it off at every house, so nobody had to make a trip or spend any money. All they had to do was open the door.
Not one household took her up on it.
What they did instead was write back with questions. What candy does he like. What snacks does he eat. What toys is he into right now. And then they went out and bought those specific things.
They put birthday signs in their own front yards with his name on them.
That afternoon Soren went to seventy houses in a banana costume, carrying a teal jack-o-lantern bucket. His mother said he was not tired at all. She said he was on a mission.
He came home with Play-Doh, and books, and stuffed animals, and Cheetos, and Lego. She said they had badly underestimated how many bags they were going to need.
Two versions of that afternoon were possible.
In the first one, a mother buys eighty three identical bowls of candy and drives them around, and the neighbors hand back out what she gave them. Soren still gets his birthday. It still works. Anybody who opened the door was being kind.
In the second one, eighty three separate households have to go find out something about one particular child, and then get in the car.
The candy was not the gift. The asking was the gift.
Now go to the first chapter of Matthew, to the night the angel is talking to Joseph.
Mary has not given birth. There is no face to look at yet. Nobody has held anything. And the name arrives ahead of the child.
And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins.
A name. Not a title, not a category, not a general provision for the human situation. GOD did not send help in bulk.
And the name was already about what HE came to do. It was chosen before anybody could have picked it based on the kind of person HE turned out to be.
That is how far ahead the attention runs.
The psalm nobody finishes says the same thing from the other end. Most people know one verse out of Psalm 139. The whole opening is stranger than that verse.
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
And a few lines later, there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
That is not a summary of humanity. That is somebody who has been watching one person get up in the morning for a very long time.
Not the large moments. The downsitting and the uprising. Sitting down in a chair. Standing up out of a bed on a morning when standing up was the entire accomplishment of the day.
And that is not surveillance. Being watched by somebody hunting for a mistake is a different thing altogether from being watched by somebody who wants to know what you are like.
You have been on the receiving end of the general version of care. Most of us have. The form letter after the funeral. The gift card somebody grabbed on the way over. The message that was clearly sent to a list, and you were on the list, and that was better than not being on it.
None of that is bad. All of it beats silence.
And you know the difference. You know it instantly. There is a particular feeling when somebody hands you a thing and it is obvious they went and found out.
GOD is not running the general version.
HE did not deal with you as a case. HE did not send a category of help toward a category of person. HE sent someone with a name, announced before HIS birth, to do a specific thing, and the psalm says HE has been paying attention to your ordinary mornings the entire time.
Eighty three households could have taken the candy that was offered to them. It was free, it was already bought, and it would have been delivered to the door.
They asked what the boy liked instead.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been handed the general version of care for a long time.
- 🙏 To the one who believes GOD knows about you rather than knows you.
- 🙏 To the one whose child does not fit the standard arrangements anywhere.
- 🙏 To the one who quit saying what you wanted out loud, because asking started to feel like too much.
Grace and Peace.