Lent 30

Did you know that there are over 4,000 different varieties of potatoes in the world?  How exactly we've managed to breed that many different types of a crop as simple as the potato, I'll never quite understand.  I mean, potatoes are not all that special.  You don't think of potatoes as a luxurious item. In order for them to taste any good, you have to load them up with any manner of flavorings (mmmmm...bacon).  On the other hand, potatoes are pretty versatile.  You can bake them, mash them, boil them, or fry them up.  And I guess because of their status as a "common" food, they're also pretty darn cheap.

I have potatoes on my mind today, because today was the day of Wesley's potato drop service project.  Yesterday afternoon, over 44,000 pounds of potatoes were dropped off in Wesley's parking lot so that we could bag them today to be delivered to local food shelters.  Evidently, Wesley has been doing this for around 10 years as a way to give back to our local community.

44,000 pounds of potatoes is a lot of potatoes.  We divided them up into 5-10 pound bags, meaning that at the end of the day, anywhere between 4,000 and 9,000 bags were stuffed with potatoes.  You can feed a lot of families with 44,000 pounds of potatoes.  But here's the thing about condensing 44,000 pounds of potatoes into 5-10 pound bags: you can't do it alone.  It takes a community to do that amount of work, and it takes a community with a varied skill set doing a variety of jobs.  You need people who are able to transport the big 50 pound bags of potatoes.  You need people to create the smaller bags that the potatoes will go into.  You need people actually stuffing the bags.  And that's exactly what one saw today in Wesley's parking lot.  There were students, members of the faculty, and staff all working together to get the job done.  In the brief amount of time I was out there, I was reminded of what exactly the Kingdom of God will look like and what it will take to build it.  It will need people working together without regard to class or creed to bring justice to an unjust world and compassion to the oppressed.  It's a process, but by the grace of God, we can do it.

Today, I saw God in 44,000 pounds of potatoes.