My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord .... —Psalm145:21 (nrsv)
I have favorite phrases I say a lot and, interestingly, many of them have to do with food. Something easy? “Can o’ corn” or maybe “Piece a cake!” When I do something foolish, I’m a “meatball!” My colleague Jack often responds to ideas or actions he likes with the phrase “Cool beans!” Once I heard someone ask, “You got the spaghetti on the cranberries?” He meant, do you have information on the situation?
One day Jack challenged me. “Every time you say ‘Can o’ corn’ in the next month, you owe your local food pantry a can of corn. Deal?”
Well, I couldn’t pass up a challenge like that, but I added a twist. “I’ll take that deal, if you’ll donate a can of beans for every time you say ‘Cool beans.’”
When some of our coworkers heard about what we were doing, unusual things began to happen. One person offered to match our totals, can for can. I’d find cans of corn in my mailbox or would be intentionally asked to do some easy task, hoping for my usual verbal response. By the time the month ended, a dozen of us had collected more than four hundred cans of vegetables for the local food pantry. Cool beans, huh?
