This morning, I was reading online about a group of neighbors in Illinois, that gathered together to help harvest the fields for a widow of one of their neighbors. This brought back a lot of memories for me from my childhood in a small farming community in Indiana.
On more than one occasion, I remember my Dad hooking up the combine or corn picker to the tractor (this was in the days when the combines and pickers were separate machines and needed to be used with a tractor) to go to help a neighbor who had been injured, sick, or to help bring in a neighbor's "final harvest." Often times, the farmers that were helping to harvest, had left their own fields with crops still in them in order to help.
The women in the community would bring in pot luck meals so the men wouldn't have to leave the fields until the harvest was finished. It was a time for helping without any thought of repayment. It was time of remembering, of caring, of showing love to your neighbor in a very practical way.
The next spring the men would gather once again and plant the crops using their own seed, machinery, and other resources, to plant the fields so that the widow would have an income for that year. If there were livestock, they would also help with that...as a community so that no one person had to do it alone.
That is real community. That is loving your neighbor as yourself. That is truly helping others by giving a hand up not a hand out. And this is how it needs to be once again in our country...neighbor helping neighbor.
To read the article mentioned above, click here.
Thanks for reading and visiting my blog.
**Photo used in today's blog is from a public domain site http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=20044&picture=sunset-on-the-farm.
