Full Measure

Hank lived in a fruit growing area and would often look for work in his school holidays picking fruit. One spring his father found him a job with a friend picking cherries. His father dropped him off on his way to work.

“Hi,” Mr. Glennings said when he saw Hank, “You can start on this row by the road. I pay by the bucket full, and though I don’t expect a pileup on top, I do expect the buckets to be full. When they are full, you can dump them in the bin on the back of the truck and mark it down on the score chart I have there. I am leaving it to your sense of honour to keep an accurate record.”

When dad came to pick him up that evening, Hank had picked 14 buckets. Not bad for his first day of work, but not that good, either. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would try for 20.

When Hank emptied his fifth bucket the next day, he noticed that two more names had been added to the score chart. He glanced at his watch. It was just a few minutes after nine. By noon the newcomers were tied with him, at twelve buckets each.

“How do they do it?” Hank asked himself. Determined not to be outdone, he barely stopped to gulp down his sandwich at lunch and then hurried back to his ladder. As he picked, he heard laughter and saw a couple of boys his own age dodging between the trees and throwing cherries at each other.

“Well, while they are playing, I can get ahead a little,” he said to himself. But when he went to empty his bucket, he saw that both boys had two more buckets recorded. “That’s impossible!” he cried. “Unless they picked those buckets before lunch. But they couldn’t be that much faster than I am…”

Hank went back to his ladder and sat on the bottom rung to ponder the problem. When Mr. Glennings came back, the other boys started picking again, but Hank still sat. Fifteen minutes later, one of the boys went to the truck with only half a bucket full. Soon after his friend did the same. When Hank went over, he saw that both boys had taken credit for two more buckets.

“So that’s how they do it!” Anger welled up within him. His first impulse was to tell Mr. Glennings. Then he thought of dumping his own buckets a little sooner just to even things up a bit. After all, the other boys were getting twice the pay for half the work. But his sense of honesty would not let him. He remembered a passage from the Bible that his father had read for devotions recently, something about “full measure, pressed down, shaken together…, and running over” (Luke 6:38 NLT)

“Wouldn’t work in this case,” he said grinning to himself, “It would bruise the cherries. Before he went to empty the next bucket, he put some extra handfuls on top. When he was marking it down, he noticed that half of the other boy’s marks had been crossed off. Suddenly he felt glad that he had not told on them.

Hank didn’t see the boys near the truck after that. Instead, they had to put the cherries they picked into boxes, and Mr. Glennings emptied the boxes into the bin himself. By three o’clock the boys had disappeared altogether.

“Did your other helpers quit?” Hank asked when he saw Mr. Glennings the next time.

“No,” replied the orchardist. “I let them go. They had no sense of responsibility.”

Hank had just started the nineteenth bucket when dad drove up that evening. “See you tomorrow,” Mr. Glennings called. “And mark that one down as a full bucket.”

“But I just started it,” Hank protested. “It isn’t more than a quarter full.”

“Never mind,” Mr. Glennings said. Your other pails have been extra-full. They make up for it.”

Hank was happy on the way home. He had picket 14 buckets the first day, received credit for 19 the second, and now he should have no problem getting twenty or more the next.

But when he arrived at work the next morning, he noticed that Mr. Glennings had tallied up his score as 21 buckets for the previous day. “What’s he up to now?” he wondered. Was the orchardist being extra generous, or was it a test?

“Mr. Glennings, why did you mark twenty-one buckets down for me?” Hank asked as soon as he saw the orchardist. “Well, you did pick twenty-one, didn’t you?”

“No, I only picked 18, plus that little bit you told me to mark down as a full bucket.”

“Well,” – Mr. Glennings’ face broke into a big smile – “I guess I must have added up the scores without my glasses on.”

“You know you have a fine boy there,” he told Dad when he came to pick Hank up that evening. “A really tremendous boy. He can work for me anytime, and when I don’t have a job for him, I will recommend him to my friends.”

“What was that all about?” Dad questioned as he was backing out of the driveway.

“I don’t know,” Hank said. Then he asked something that had been puzzling him all day. “Dad, does Mr. Glennings wear glasses?”

“He might wear safety glasses around machinery, or goggles when he is spraying, but other than that, he doesn’t,” replied his father.

“I didn’t think so,” Hank said, “He was just teasing me.” And he happily settled back for the ride home.

From the sermon on the mount; “For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” (Luke 6:38.)