Two Potatoes

Preacher:
Date: January 26, 2015

Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words | It happened in the 1930s during the days of the Great Depression in America. My Dad had just accepted the pastorate of a small church with a weekly salary of only $10.

One day Mr. Smith, a farmer in the church, backed his little white pick-up truck into their yard and unloaded a one hundred pound sack of potatoes into their shed. And Mr. Smith said, “When these are gone let me know and I’ll bring you another sack.” My parents thanked him with grateful hearts.

One hundred pounds of potatoes! They felt like millionaires. You can do so many different things with potatoes. You can boil them, bake them, fry them, hash-brown them, stuff them, au gratin them, and more. They really enjoyed those potatoes.

But as the weeks went by, the potatoes in the sack were going down and down. Then my Dad remembered that Mr. Smith had said, “When these are done give me a call and I’ll bring you another sack.”

My Dad said he didn’t know whether it was pride or stubbornness, but he simply could not bring himself to ask Mr. Smith for more potatoes. But he did get down on his knees and asked God to tell Mr. Smith that they needed more potatoes.

Do you know in less than two weeks time the little white pick-up truck stopped at their back door and Mr. Smith unloaded another one-hundred pound sack of potatoes. And when my Dad looked in the first sack there were exactly two potatoes left.

Just to think that they had a God who loved them enough even to keep track of the number of potatoes in their sack!   That simple little experience, my Dad said, gave him faith to trust God, in the years that followed, for tens of thousands of dollars for the work of the Lord.

As the Apostle Paul said, “My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).