Tertullian once wrote, “The human soul is Christian by nature.” For years I tried to make sense of that line. I interpreted it as a poetic way of saying that every person has the capacity to sense the presence of God. But it wasn’t until an ordinary afternoon—an afternoon of errands, worry, and a five-liter pot of borscht—that I saw how those words can suddenly come alive in a person.

A friend and I had been helping a family with six children. Their mother was gravely ill, and while I cooked for them, my friend usually handled the deliveries. One day she had to leave abruptly, so I packed the huge pot of borscht, called a local taxi, and hoped for the best.

The driver who arrived was familiar: stern, quick to criticize, always lamenting the mess previous passengers had left behind. I placed the pot carefully on the floor and held the lid to avoid spills. It was a short ride. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything, of course. Near the destination he swung sharply to avoid an oncoming car, and the borscht sloshed out—into my bag, onto the floor mats. In a moment of sheer panic, I ran. I paid and fled the taxi before courage could catch up with me. Minutes later, guilt forced me to call the dispatcher and confess, asking her to relay my apologies to the driver.

Weeks passed.

Rushing to church one Sunday, I called a taxi without thinking. When I got in, a stern voice announced, “Well, here we meet again.” It was him. And he had not forgotten. All the way to the church he scolded me for the ruined mat, for the cost of the cleaning, for the irresponsibility of it all. At the end, he presented the bill. I paid, apologized again, and—out of honesty or desperation—explained the whole story: the sick mother, the large family, the urgency, the reason the pot had been there at all.

His expression changed. The hardness gave way to something gentler, almost vulnerable. And then, astonishingly, he returned the money. Not only that—he added a few extra bills and asked me to buy fruit for the children he had unwittingly helped.

Walking home after the service, I kept replaying the encounter. What caused such a sudden turn in this man, so resolute in his frustration just moments before? Why the impulse not just to forgive, but to participate in the good?

And then Tertullian’s words resurfaced: the soul is Christian by nature. Not in the sense of doctrine or affiliation, but in possessing a spark of divine love—a built-in orientation toward compassion, sacrifice, and conscience. Often it lies dormant beneath layers of irritation, suspicion, or fatigue. But sometimes a simple story, a glimpse of another person’s struggle, wakes it up.

That morning, I saw such a soul in the last place I expected: behind the wheel of a taxi, in a man whose first reaction was annoyance but whose deeper nature was generosity. A nature capable of turning frustration into charity with the same startling suddenness as a pot of borscht spilling in the back seat.

And maybe that is Tertullian’s point. We do not become capable of goodness; we uncover the goodness that was there all along.