When life hands you cabbages…

…cut them into thin slices until all the cabbages are gone.

 

The other day Jenny, Cait, and I were in a township called Masoy to help with a sewing group that meets at the church there every Tuesday. But they didn’t need our help with that. Since we had nothing to do, we sat and talked. The lady who teaches the local women then suggested that we go help with the cooking, so we walked to the “kitchen” she’d pointed towards and offered our assistance. 

 

Cabbages and knives were promptly placed into our hands. Slightly confused as to what exactly we were supposed to do, we hesitantly began cutting them, trying to produce the same outcome as the siSwati woman who’d been chopping it before had done.  It wasn’t as easy as it looked. After each of us had shredded (or tried) a few cabbages, a black woman came to the table, and cut up a cabbage in at least half the time we’d been taking. While she manipulated her knife to produce finely shredded cabbage, I stared at her hands in amazement. She had obviously been doing this for a while.

 

She left, and we tried to mimic her actions. For me, it didn’t work too well, though, so I created my own way of accomplishing the task. We kept slicing cabbages. Slowly, the pile of cabbages on the table diminished. We were glad to see it, as our hands hurt from gripping the dull knives we had used to chop up at least 100 cabbages by this point.

When only 4 small cabbages remained to be sliced, the woman placed more cabbages on the table for us to cut.

Great. Oh, well. They needed to be cut for the coleslaw, so we continued to chop.

Just keep cutting. Just keep cutting…

So we sliced the cabbages until Terri told us it was time to go. Although we hadn’t cut all of them up, there were only around 15 left. Definitely less than when we started.

 

Something I learned through this day’s work is that although the task may be mundane, tedious, and slightly painful, it’s worth it in the end, especially because I want to glorify and praise the living God through every work I do.

The cabbages, which would be made into coleslaw and served with pap (corn meal porridge), were going to feed about 400 hungry people in that community. If I have to experience some pain and sacrifice time to help meet this end, then so be it. I’d rather have the hungry be fed anyway.

 

It’s worth it in the end.