One of the best things I ever did was go with Dad to cut wood.

It was a church thing. If I remember correctly, someone had “donated” the trees on a back corner of their property. Dad and I met up with a bunch of men from church: gloves, chainsaws. I was … 19? 17? Something like that. Home from school, I’m pretty sure.

I was not allowed to mess with chainsaws. In those days, I could hardly walk from here to there without grievous injury, so I was in charge of hauling and stacking.

When the trees were cut, we stacked them onto the back of a pallet truck and drove into a shabby little neighborhood, full of tiny houses set up on cinderblocks, and we passed out the wood to the people living there. They were mostly old, with a few young women surrounded by very small children.

One old man made a long speech about how we were true Christians, doing God’s work by making sure they could stay warm in the cold winter. We were a bunch of Episcopalians and mostly white dudes, not given to effusiveness. We shuffled our feet and stared at the ground. Dad shook the man’s hand.

“That’s why we do this,” Dad said to me as he climbed back up into the back of the truck with me. “Things you think are small can make a big difference in someone’s life.”

One of the doctors said to  us, “You know he doesn’t have the best heart.”

Except he did. He had the very best heart.