Pine Island Pastor Musings

My recent visit to Longwood Gardens has inspired my thinking about wealthy CEOs and employment practices.  My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary there while on vacation.  My maternal grandfather worked for P. S. DuPont there his whole career during its development.  Today, Longwood Gardens is one of the world's premiere gardens and arboretums and employs 1,800 employees and volunteers. P. S. DuPont is considered by some as the father of the modern corporation.  He became director of the DuPont family business at an early age and built it into an international corporate giant in the chemical industry.  The DuPont family's investments included General Motors stock. As majority stock owner in 1919, the family appointed him as chair of General Motors board of directors.  Not surprisingly, he became quite wealthy, an American success story.  And like the Upjohn and Gilmore families of Kalamazoo, he was a benevolent employer and phil...

Hope Garden is now in full production! This morning I joined Bob, Laura and Chris, our new garden intern, for a few hours.  We harvested, cleaned, and packed tomatoes, cucumbers, egg plants, zucchini squash, peppers, and finished by digging a row of Kennebec potatoes.    I love digging potatoes...for a couple of reasons.  One is that it takes me back to a childhood experience picking potatoes.  My father served as pastor of a rural congregation.  Many of the members were farmers who raised potatoes as a cash crop.  He introduced them to the Lord's Acre movement popular in rural churches in the late 1940s and 50s.  That congregation tried it for a couple of years.  A farm family dedicated an acre of land to the Lord's work.  The next year a different family dedicated an acre. The Lord's Acre was planted with potatoes.  When ready to harvest, the farmer would unearth the potatoes with a machine pulled by a tractor....