What a Great Idea

This past weekend Pam and I had the solo stove fired up on the deck one night. After the sun went down it started to feel chilly out so it was perfect timing. The great thing about a fire is its hypnotic effect. As you watch the flames rise and wiggle themselves skyward it calms you. After a while you realize that you have not taken your eyes off the fire for half an hour. All of the conversation between us gets spoken into the fire. The words you speak seem more meaningful when spoken into the dancing flames.

At some point Pam starts telling me about something she saw on television or the internet about Black Friday, that particularly American embarrassment of greed. She told of someone who said, “Look, we all have big screen TVs now. Why do they put them on sale for Black Friday? If they really want to put something on sale for Black Friday why don’t they discount groceries by 50% for 24 hours?”

What an awesome idea. The inflation of the past 18 months has driven up the cost of basic groceries to the point where some families are truly struggling. Pam sometimes comes home from the grocery store with three bags, shaking her head when she comes in the door. “Guess how much these three bags cost? $125! It’s ridiculous!” For us, the rise in grocery prices is an annoyance, not a crisis. For others every trip to Publix or Food Lion is a gut-wrenching cost/benefit analysis.

This morning I saw where a friend of mine posted an idea on Facebook. You know how sometimes grocery stores will do buy one get one free promotions on random items? Well, this lady told how her store had one of those promotions on bags of potatoes. She loves potatoes but they don’t eat them fast enough to use an entire bag before some of them have gone bad. So, as she was standing in the checkout line she noticed the family in front of her looked like they might could use some help so she says to them, “Excuse me, there’s a buy one get one free sale on potatoes but my husband and I will never eat two bags fast enough before they go bad. Could you use this extra bag?”

What a fantastic idea. My church does a monthly food bank drive. They hand out special bags with a shopping list inside that provides ingredients for multiple meals for a family of four for one week. We fill the bags and bring them back to church the following Sunday. Each month we take a 3000 pound load of groceries to the Goochland food bank. In November there’s a special full Thanksgiving meal shopping list for a family of four, another good idea.

As we enter the holiday season we all need to think about the folks around us in our communities who are struggling with tight budgets. We need to come up with our own ideas about how we can help, we who have been given so much. Yes…there are government programs that help and yes…we pay taxes that fund those programs. But, why should we let the government have all the fun? Besides, with every government assistance program comes paperwork and bureaucracy, and as a result many people fall through the cracks. That’s where people like us, like you and me come in.

Make a fire one night this weekend. Sit under the stars and stare into it, giving thanks for your great good fortune. Maybe a great idea will come to you.