The value of choke-cherry jelly and sausage dog magnets
The other night I sat down and read the book A River Runs Through It in one sitting, because it’s only 104 pages. I’ve previously mentioned the movie based on this book and have been keen to read the whole book. In one of the few explicit moments in the book about what is happening in the family, there is this conversation between the father and the older brother, concerning the younger brother (a man now in his early thirties making bad decisions):
“You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help I don’t mean a courtesy like serving choke-cherry jelly or giving money.
“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
“So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’”
I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn’t have to be anything that big.”
He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?”
“She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.”
“Do you think you help him?” he asked me.
“I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don’t know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don’t even know whether he needs help. I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”
“That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?
“I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”
To me that really captured something of those times when we feel quite literally helpless, when we want to do something, the best thing, but don't know what that is. The other evening I was dashing off from work a little earlier than usual for a coffee in the city with someone I have been meeting up with for a while, who is coming out the other end of a mess. As I was leaving, one of my work colleagues came up to my desk to tell me that she found out that day that she needs to have her thyroid gland removed because it has a growth that could be cancerous. I delayed my departure a few minutes to talk about this. Then I had the coffee with the other friend and felt like there was more to say but that it couldn’t just be said plainly (or that I wasn’t much good at saying it plainly). On the way home I remembered that my friend at work really liked sausage dogs, and that I had previously mentioned these great sausage dog magnets I had seen to her (they are tiny little moulded sausage dogs, with very strong little magnets on the bottom of their bellies so that they stand off the surface you put them on) so I stopped in at the shop and bought them. As I put them on her desk the next day before she got in I couldn’t help but think ‘it’s brilliant isn’t it - someone tells me they might have cancer so I give them sausage dog magnets’.
Do sausage dog magnets really make a difference? What was I trying to say leaving a packet of magnets on her desk?
I think there is some value in the seemingly small deeds, in the magnetic sausage dogs, the fishing, the buttering of rolls (with some evidence for this coming from Matthew 25:34-40). But it's in making the real connection between the deeds to the most valuable life-changing truths, to the story gospel that I often feel inadequate, as clearly the father in the story above does too.
On my last trip to Koorong, several months ago now, I bought the book “Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in need of change helping people in need of change”, which I am yet to read (it's in the pile). I'm hoping to glean something about joining more of the dots and aiming at something resembling what is expressed so beautifully in this song by Sara Groves.