Growing Good Corn

There once was a farmer who grew award-winning corn. Each year he entered his corn in the state fair where it won a blue ribbon.

One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about how he grew it. He discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbours.

“How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbours when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.

“Why,” said the farmer, “didn't you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbours grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.”

The farmer was very aware of the connectedness of life. His corn cannot improve unless his neighbour's corn also improves. So it is with our lives. Those who choose to live in peace must help their neighbours to live in peace. Those who choose to live well must help others to live well, for the value of a life is measured by the lives it touches. And those who choose to be happy must help others to find happiness, for the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all.

The Acorn Planter

In the 1930s, a young traveller exploring the French Alps came upon a vast stretch of barren land. It was desolate and forbidding. It was ugly — the kind of place you hurry away from.

Suddenly, the young traveller stopped dead in his tracks. In the middle of this vast wasteland was a bent-over old man. On his back was a sack of acorns and in his hand a length of iron pipe. The man was using the pipe to punch holes in the ground. Then from the sack he would take an acorn and put it in the hole. The old man told the traveller, "I've planted over 100,000 acorns. Perhaps only a tenth of them will grow." The old man's wife and son had died, and this was how he chose to spend his final years. "I want to do something useful," he said.

Twenty-five years later the now-not-as-young traveller returned to the same area. What he saw amazed him. The land was covered with a beautiful forest two miles wide and five miles long. Birds were singing, animals were playing, and wild flowers perfumed the air.

The traveller stood there recalling the desolation that once was; a beautiful oak forest stood there now — all because someone cared.