One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four. And 7,000 Pounds More.

Last Friday, a call went out on Facebook that a farmer friend of mine needed a hand unloading 7,000 pounds of potatoes coming in late on a tractor-trailer. The truck was delayed, some of those that were going to help out when the shipment was supposed to have come in earlier in the day, had to leave.

I was at home when I saw the message. I was going to lift weights. I decided to pick up potatoes instead. I remembered an old comic in Mad Magazine where a kid is lifting weights while his poor mom is taking out a massive trash can load of garbage. It is easy to ignore pleas for help. Pretend I didn't see it. The story of the Good Samaritan starts with seeing but not responding. Luke 10 is clear that they saw.  

However,  I decided to run contrary to my individual inertia and hopped in my car and headed West to York. It was only while driving out to the location that I recalled that my farmer friend had bailed me out years before when, during one Halloween Night, he hurried to my house with extra bags of candy when I uncharacteristically got bum rushed by kids in hordes. He came, no questions asked, no pay back favors promised. I had his back as he had mine, even though the memory had faded.

It looked like all of the people at the potato unpacking were small family farmers and the load needed to be divided by the types of potatoes first (who knew there were so many varieties) and the portioned out. It was a fun and interesting experience, kind of an adventure. Nearly four tons of potatoes is quite the quarry.

I know that often I can see helping and volunteering as a duty rather than a joy. Like there is a rule that I can't have fun helping out and doing good.

There is a verse in the New Testament which the Apostle Paul states is from the mouth of Jesus Himself but the Gospels themselves never quote Him saying it, that it is more "Blessed to give than receive." How interesting that this saying, so central to the message of the Gospel, would be retold secondhand through an Apostle at the end, as one "abnormally born" in his own words, but so fully describe the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

"And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make." Wendell Berry