Sunday Lesson: What To Do? Too Many Tomatoes?

I LOVE cherry tomatoes, but not just any cherry tomatoes.  The kind you find at the grocery store are just so-so and even the local produce market only comes up short.  The absolute BEST cherry tomatoes (or any tomatoes for that matter) come from my father's garden.  Maybe it has something to do with the salt air and the dirt (mixed with local sand?) that makes them taste so great.  (Even better than the ones my dad used to grow in North NJ.)  I love to pick them fresh off the vine and eat them.  Delicious!

This year he's had a bumper crop.  They are growing and growing.  There are little orange tomatoes lurking everywhere.

My son spent the past week at the shore at Marine Science Camp (http://www.marinesciencecamp.com) and stayed with my parents.  Friday, he and my father went out and picked as many tomatoes as they could.  They came back with an entire bucket full of them.  (And this was a BIG bucket).  As much as I love them, there were even too many for me to eat.

So I decided to take some to church with me this morning.  I figured it could share them with a few people there who might want to take some home.  And that would have solved my problem.  But my problem became a solution when I realized that this was the first Sunday of the month; which is the Sunday when some very generous and dedicated people make and deliver meals to shut ins.  I brought in a bowl of tomatoes just as they were finishing up making individual salads.  The timing couldn't have been more perfect.

It also tied into the sermon of the day:  the feeding of the 5000.  Although my bowl of tomatoes wouldn't feed that many, they would enhance the meal. And when it comes to hunger, every little contribution counts. As highlighted in a recent issue of National Geographic, 1/6 of the American population doesn’t have enough to eat.  Does my bowl of tomatoes make a difference?  It does!  Every little bit does.  For every person who donates extra vegetables from their garden or drops off a can of soup or box of cereal to the local food bank; it makes a difference. Maybe just a little difference, but a difference all the same.

So the next time you have a few too many tomatoes, peaches or whatever you might grow, why not consider donating them to your local food bank?  Or pass them along to someone in your neighborhood would might need them?

Those little things do make a difference.  No matter how tiny the dent might be that we could put into the problem of hunger in America, ANY dent is a victory.