There is a coffee can on the counter at the feed store with a photograph taped to the front. The photograph changes every few months. Right now it is a little girl in a ball cap, smiling with a gap in her teeth. Under the photograph somebody has written her name and the words Please Pray. Every man who buys a sack of feed drops in what he has. I have come to think of it as the best health care system we have.
Scripture tells us to bear one another’s burdens. I have always loved that verse, because it asks something of us that we can actually do. We cannot cure a sick child. We can put a bill in a can. We can bake a pie for the auction. We can share the family’s page online and pray for them at Wednesday supper. That is the church doing what the church was made to do.
People in the cities would like to turn all of this into a program. They want forms and agencies and some office in another town handling it. I understand the impulse, but I think it misses the point. A program takes care of a stranger. A coffee can takes care of a neighbor. When the help comes from people who know your name, it means something more than money.
I will admit that the system has its quirks. The families who do best are usually the ones with a good photograph and a story people can understand. A child does better than a grown man. A family the whole church knows does better than one that just moved to town. Someone told me once that this is not fair. I told him it is not meant to be fair. It is meant to be love, and love has always had its favorites.
A family I know had a hard year with the husband’s heart. They held a barbecue plate sale in the church parking lot and raised a good deal, and the rest they are still paying off a little at a time. They tell me it brought them closer to God. I believe them. Debt has a way of keeping a man on his knees, and there are worse places for a man to be.
I have heard people say the coffee can is a sign that something is broken. I see it the other way. It is a sign that something is working: our hearts. Those cans are not on the counter because we failed. They are on the counter because we care. If the day ever came when nobody needed one, I am not sure how we would show each other what we are made of.
I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall to keep those cans on the counter. So far as I can tell, the other side would like a family’s hospital bill to get paid without a photograph, and I am afraid we would lose something the day it was.
So I keep my pockets full of small bills when I go into town. I never know whose photograph will be on the can.
I gave what I could to a family last month, and I prayed for them as well. I hope one of the two was enough.
D. M.