The Same Truck

Cedar Valley News
May 27, 2026
The Same Truck
By Lars Olson

Saturday morning, the Methodist pastor’s boy came in. He is fifteen. He set a broken pull cord and a fouled spark plug on the counter between us and waited. Then he asked whether my ward needed help with the food drive next Thursday.

I did not answer right away. I asked him whether his father had sent him. He said his father had not, exactly. He had heard at supper two of our men were down with the flu, and he wanted to come ask himself.

I told him yes. He left with the new cord, the spark plug, and a receipt for $14.30.

I am the bishop of the Cedar Valley Ward. Many of the same people walk through both doors.

Sunday evening, in the bishop’s office, I told my second counselor about the boy. My counselor is a quiet man. He ran a carpentry crew for thirty years before he was called. He listened, and then said the boy had been listening at his supper table long before Saturday morning, and the rest of us could probably do less of the talking and more of the same.

The same week, in Dallas, a truck pulled up to Joe’s Food Pantry, run by Catholic Charities. It was the hundredth of two hundred and fifty truckloads The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is delivering this year to food banks in all fifty states, by Independence Day and beyond. The food came from our storehouses. The pantry will feed nearly thirty-four thousand meals worth of Dallas residents from a single truck. Some of it would also go to Soldiers’ Angels for a new pantry for veterans and military families.

David Woodyard, who runs Catholic Charities Dallas, said the partnership with our church sits at the top of his list of collaborators. His chief development officer, Kelly Noonan, called the relationship more than they could have imagined when they started.

I read these things at the back of my store on Wednesday morning, between a customer asking about deck stain and another asking about a frozen exterior faucet. Then I went home and ate supper. I thought about the boy.

There are towns where the bishop and the Catholic priest never speak. There are towns where the Methodist youth and the LDS youth do not know each other’s names. In such towns, a truck arriving is news because it would not have happened otherwise.

In Cedar Valley, the truck would have happened anyway. The priest from St. Anne’s is in here every six or eight weeks for a fitting or a flapper or a sash chain. He has been coming in for nineteen years. The Methodist parsonage roof had a leak two springs back, and I sold them the metal flashing at cost, because the trustee who came in for it had voted on every school bond Cedar Valley has issued since 1994. The Baptist youth pastor and my second counselor have built three wheelchair ramps together in the last twelve months. The last was for a woman in the Baptist congregation whose son works for me Saturdays and had asked his pastor for help.

None of this is a project. None of it earns a press release. The phone numbers were exchanged years ago, at funerals mostly, and at a chamber breakfast in 2011 nobody remembers but everyone showed up for.

Faith does not have to agree on the second person of the Trinity to agree on what a hungry child needs.

The Methodist pastor’s boy is bringing four of his friends to help unload the truck on Thursday. Two of them are not Methodist. None of them are LDS. One is the son of an electrician who came in last week for box staples and stayed twenty minutes because we were both trying to remember the man who taught both of us how to wire a junction box.

The boy did not wait for his father. The part I keep coming back to is the listening he was already doing.

Tomorrow morning, call the pastor of a church you do not attend. Ask what is on their list this month. The answer will be shorter than you think.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. We would be glad to hear which churches in your town have learned to work together, and what they have built. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, David Woodyard, Kelly Noonan, Joe’s Food Pantry, Catholic Charities Dallas, Soldiers’ Angels, and the America250 food donation initiative of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are real.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.