by Kathleen Kastilahn

Mildred bought 10 five-pound bags of flour last Tuesday night when we did her weekly grocery shopping. Her favorite brand was on sale, 10 for $10. A bag regularly sells for $2.19. I hefted those sacks — from the lower shelf into the cart, from the cart to the conveyor belt at the register, back into the cart, out of the cart and into my car, from the car up six steps into her house, and then down a flight of stairs to her basement. Who needs to lift weights at the gym?

Helping Mildred started simply enough one night when I asked her if she’d like a ride home. I’d just said good-night to my dad and was on my way out the door of the retirement home where he lived and where Mildred worked as the evening receptionist. "That would be great," she said. "It’ll save me cab fare." Then one night, she asked, as she got in the car, "Could we stop at the supermarket? It’ll save me walking there with my cart."

That was nine years ago. Mildred retired last spring at 95. So I pick her up at her house now. But that’s about all that’s changed. My friends think I do something special. I get a lot of credit for helping Mildred.

The truth is, it’s Mildred who’s helped me learn what helping is all about.

That flour will be kneaded into cardamom coffee cakes — for coffee hour at the Lutheran church half a block from her house where she’s a charter member. And for one friend who’s recovering from back surgery and for another who has her son and his family coming to visit. It will be blended into batter for the Swedish pancakes that she’ll make for lunch for several of Mildred’s former telephone company colleagues, all long retired. It will be transformed into wafer–thin krumkake, rolled cookies that she makes almost daily and boxes up to have ready to give away to the next-door neighbor, perhaps, who will shovel her walk before he goes to work.

I’m part of the equation: I help Mildred help. I help her keep on living the way she was raised. Many times she’s told me, over a cup of tea, how her mother and father—Swedish immigrants — took care of other newcomers from their homeland. While her own list of people she looks out for is much more encompassing, including a young man from Jamaica, her motivation is the same as her parents’ was.

Mildred is grateful for the rides to the store, and she thanks me. But she also expects them because it’s what I can do. And she’s never hesitant to suggest that we make a second stop because another store is having a sale on butter. Mildred’s shown me that helping is how we get the job done of being the Body of Christ, how we’re all needed–as Paul tells us in great specificity, from the eye to the foot — and that "God has so arranged the body...[that] the members may have the same care for one another" (1 Corinthians 12:24–25).

How different is that view from the most famous verse that’s not in the Bible, "The Lord helps those who help themselves." God commands, rather, that we love our neighbor as ourselves.

Shopping Tuesdays also teach me, week by week, about the discipline of helping. I’ll admit there are some nights when I’d rather go for a walk by the lake or curl up with a book or even toss in a load of neglected laundry. But I pick up Mildred. I think committing to regular, routine, count–on–me helping has it all over practicing random acts of kindness — at least as a spiritual discipline.

I’ve always identified with Apostle Paul’s struggle — I do what I would not do and do not do that which I want to do (Romans 7:19) — that in fact is our human condition. But I’ve learned, too, that having someone count on you makes it easier to do the good that you would do. That plays out the other way around, too.

"Driving in the country, if I pass a sign about the community group that has adopted that stretch of highway and keeps it clean, I’ll thank them," Mary Ann Brussat wrote in her blog for the New Morning Show on www.faithstreams.com. "Day after day, it’s the little helping gestures that enable us to trust that we can really depend upon each other." Brussat, who writes extensively on spiritual practices, recognizes that the people on either end of the equation of helping don’t even have to know each other — ever — for the helping to be of mutual benefit.

Author and pastor Garret Keizer has spent a lot of time contemplating and researching the subject of help and takes readers along to find out what he’s discovered in his latest book, Help: The Original Human Dilemma (Harper SanFrancisco, 2004). One of his most fascinating thoughts is his assertion that help is at the core of what it means to be human: "Over the centuries we have tried to define our species in terms of some faculty to which we can make an exclusive claim: language, tool making or sapience," he writes, and lists the challenges to each of these in a lengthy paragraph before concluding, "Our ability to give and receive help may be our best alternative for defining humankind."

Later in his opening chapter he shares a concern about the challenge to this ability, particularly here in this culture. "I am also interested in the ways that our sense of obligation chafes against our desire for independence," he writes. "We wish to be good; we also wish to be free, and if that tension is arguably human, it is definitely American."

Ours is the "land of the free," where self-reliance is considered a virtue, where men who picked themselves up by their bootstraps often climbed to the top, where do-it-yourself and self-help books are perennial best-sellers.

Why are we Americans so hesitant to ask for help? Do we not realize that asking for help shows strength as well as humility? Do we not listen, really listen, to Scripture?

Consider two women who get help from Jesus. The Canaanite woman whose encounter Matthew recounts (15:22–28) shouts out: "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." Jesus doesn’t answer her. She trails him and the disciples until Jesus does answer — with a no: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

But this mother will not take no for an answer, even when Jesus refers to Canaanites, to her and her daughter, as "dogs." She comes right back at him: "Yes, Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table."

And that gets Jesus’ attention — and help. "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." Her daughter was "healed instantly," Matthew ends this story. But I’ve heard contemporary scholars muse that Jesus was helped, too, in this exchange. Perhaps this was the first time he realized that his call was to all.

The woman with a hemorrhage introduced to us by Mark (5:25–34) doesn’t even ask Jesus for help. Rather, she reaches out and takes it in an astonishingly bold move—as she "came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak."

It worked. "[S]he felt in her body that she was healed of her disease." And Jesus knew something had happened, he was "immediately aware that power had gone forth from him" and looked about to see who had touched his clothes. She admits her action, and Jesus blesses her: "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."

The women are bold in seeking help from Jesus because they know he can help them. That’s one aspect of these lessons that we women of the 21st century have to learn — again. Another is what happens after they receive the help they asked for: Community is restored, with a place for the daughter healed of the demon, and the woman cured of the hemorrhage.

Often, too often, we consider only ourselves when we ask — or don’t ask — for help. But think about it. When we actually do receive the help we need, it can benefit many others, spiraling out to those whom we touch and to even more whom we may never know. From this perspective, asking for the help we need and expecting to get it can be considered both our duty and our delight as members of the Body of Christ.

"Ask for help when you need it" is but one of some "40 Ideas for How to Build Community" on a poster from Syracuse Cultural Workers www.syrculturalworkers.com that I particularly like. It comes as a bit of surprise in the long and lovely litany of things you can do for others — from "greet people" to "pick up litter" to "organize a block party." But it shouldn’t, not when we understand just how much asking for help when you need it helps others, too.

One of the many other suggestions proves this point — and makes me smile: "Bake extra and share it." I wonder how many people are going to enjoy what Mildred makes from those 50 pounds of flour.

Kathleen Kastilahn, a section editor at The Lutheran, is a member of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Evanston, Ill.