Everybody, Always

anyway? I wondered. Camouflage? Body armor? Nothing at all? I wasn’t
sure.
I arrived for the event and made my way to a huge warehouse where
the croc drop was going to happen. I got to the door, puffed out my chest,
took a deep breath, and said out loud, “Bring it!” as I opened the door and
walked inside. It only took me a moment to realize I’d gotten something
terribly wrong. This place wasn’t filled with crocodiles as I’d expected; it
was filled with potatoes. Lots of potatoes. Thousands of them. It seemed
all potatoes ever grown were in there. And lots of people too. Not
everyone in Alabama, but most of them.
A youngish guy came up to me, thrust out his hand, and introduced
himself as the guy who had invited me. I was still a little confused and
kept glancing up at the ceiling. I didn’t want to be rude, but after a couple
of awkward minutes of small talk, I drummed up the courage to ask him,
“So where are the crocodiles, and where do they drop from?”
He looked at me for a second, half-grinning, and cocked his head.
“Crocodiles?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You know, for the croc drop.”
A huge grin grew over his face and he exploded into a belly laugh.
“This isn’t a croc drop. It’s a crop drop!”
“A crop drop?” I asked, more than a little disappointed.
That would explain all the potatoes, but I still didn’t get it.
He told me there were a couple of fields just outside of town. When
the crops are picked by machine, many of the potatoes are left on the
ground afterward. All the churches in the area gather together and glean
the fields to get the potatoes the machines missed and then bag them for
the poor and hungry in the community.
“We’re all just bagging potatoes here. We want to make good use of
what gets passed over.”
It was such a beautiful picture of what the church is and who we’re
supposed to be. Inside the warehouse, there were no name tags, no
members, no separate identities, no building programs, no matching