As I wove my way through the glut of shoppers around me, I steered my cart with one hand and glanced at the shopping list open on my phone in the other.
One item remained.
Strawberries.
It was late in the summer of 2013, and I had just returned from a week of building houses with a mission team in Baja, Mexico. While it sometimes seems as if the trip was about helping a family move into a new home, it was really about their moving into our hearts, and us into theirs.
One item remained.
Strawberries.
Now I had bought strawberries in that store more times than I’ve heard the names Donald and Hillary in the past year, so I knew I would soon be done.
Only I wasn’t.
I picked up a package of strawberries with little thought, but when I looked at them in my hand, I noticed something I had never noticed before.
In the upper left hand corner of the package was a sticker bearing the name of the berry company that had produced, picked, and packaged them. When I saw it, my hand froze. And my mind raced.
I was suddenly back in the dusty Baja winds, remembering the work camps in which families lived in conditions no one should endure, and hearing again the stories of the low wages and inhumane treatment of the workers.
This time, instead of putting the berries in my cart, I put them back on the shelf.
In that moment, I made an internal commitment to not buy that brand of berries until they treated their workers as people, and not as tools, or worse.
I didn’t broadcast my decision.
And I was under no illusion that such a simple act would change anything for anyone.
All I knew was that package of strawberries compelled me to remember the people I had met, the ones who had welcomed me into their hearts. And as I remembered them and the conditions in which they lived and worked, my faith called to me to act on their behalf.
And that’s why I put those strawberries back on the shelf.
But that’s also why Carol continues to put them in her cart.
She was part of that same team. We even worked with the same family to build the same house. And she came to love the people there as much as I did, perhaps even more.
It was only a few weeks ago, some three years after our trip, that I learned that Carol had also sensed her faith calling her to act on their behalf. And that’s why she keeps buying that brand. She hopes that doing so will improve the conditions for our friends who work those fields.
Since learning of her commitment, I have discovered most people from our team do as she does. They buy the berries in the slim chance that perhaps they were picked by someone they met in Baja. But even as they buy them, they acknowledge the tension they now feel in something that used to be simple.
Maybe that’s what happens when people become more than foils at the center of our debates, when they enter our hearts and we realize that we belong to them and they to us, that we are neighbors on this planet we call home.
Perhaps in a messy world, and in these days when we each see only in part, the best we can do is to consider how our faith invites us to choose. And maybe a part of that choosing is to engage the harder task of listening to the voices of those whose commitment to their faith leads them to choose differently.
And maybe by refusing to make one choice “right” and the other “wrong” we’ll discover that our actions, when motivated by a desire to love God with all that we are, and our neighbors as ourselves, might lead us closer to a world made new.
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