Once upon a time, there was a mother who made the perfect lunch for her little boy.

Perfect.

Isn’t that the goal of every back-to-school mom? To make perfect lunches for your child?

Five seconds on Pinterest will show you that the perfect school lunch is:

• Healthy – No peanuts, no gluten, no processed or refined products, no sodas and of course no high fructose corn syrup! Only organic products from your local farmer’s market, or if you really love your kids, from your own pesticide-free garden. Duh.
• Safe (for your kids and for the environment) – Your child does not need a side of BPA with his hummus, so only glass – NO plastic – containers, obviously. And his super-cute lunch bag should be hand-sewn from re-purposed kitchen curtains.
• Delicious – Because you’re Super Mom and you actually love your kids (unlike those other mothers who send – cough – lunch money), your kids will salivate at the thought of your tasty homemade treats. And they will never tire of the recipes because you have a minimum of thirty combinations that rotate on a well-organized schedule.
• Cute – Maybe you write your child a limerick every day or maybe you just carve his food into circus animals. Whatever your creative bent, your child’s only dilemma each day in the cafeteria is whether to eat his perfect lunch or display it in the school foyer. It’s that artistic!

Now that you’re caught up on the Pinterest version of a perfect lunch, let me tell you more about the mother I mentioned earlier. The one who made the perfect lunch for her little boy.

She didn’t use Pinterest!

She didn’t even use the internet!

In fact, the lunch she sent with her son wasn’t even well-balanced. It contained fish and – gasp – FIVE loaves of bread! Seriously, what kind of mother lets her child eat so many carbs?

But here’s why her son’s mediocre, off-balanced, no theme lunch was so perfect: Because it could be used by God.

“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” John 6:9 NIV

We all know the story of how Jesus took that little boy’s lunch and used it to perform one of the best-known miracles in the Bible – the feeding of over five thousand people. We’ve heard the story a hundred times and love the boy’s willingness to share and the lesson in faith that the disciples learned that day.

But we often forget that behind the loaves and fishes was a mama who packed a lunch.

It just so happened that on that particular day, God used that lunch for His glory. But she probably packed dozens, if not hundreds, of other lunches that were just, well, lunches.

So what turns an ordinary lunch into a perfect lunch? As a mother, how do you make sure you’re packing a perfect lunch for your child?

You teach him that:

• Every day may not be a miraculous day, but God is still God even when your lunch is just a lunch.
• As his mother, you will do your best to give him the tools he needs to be prepared for whenever God chooses to use him.
• But in the end, it’s up to him to be used by God or not.
• You can pack a lunch. Only he can allow God to use it for His glory.

Your child may go through an entire twelve years of school with ordinary lunches. The question is will he be prepared for that ONE time when God chooses to turn his lunch into a miracle?

Your job is not to force perfect moments upon your child by outdoing yourself with artwork and poetry and organic, thematic, musical, color-coordinated delicacies.

Your job is just to prepare your child to be used by God. And if that happens to be through a lunch, well then, you can always Pin it on Pinterest.

Emily E. Ryan is the Executive Editor of Priority Ministries and the author of three books including Guilt-Free Quiet Times and Who Has Your Heart? Connect with Emily on Facebook and Twitter.