A man was sent to the worst part of town to help the people who lived there. When he got there, he set himself up in an abandoned house and set to work breaking up the ground on the property.
A few days went by, and when the man still hadn’t given the people the help they wanted—the help they thought they needed—they began to murmur against him. They thought he had come to give them things.
Occasionally one or two would come by the place where the man lived to watch him working in the dirt, but every encounter was always the same: the people in the worst part of town didn’t get it. They left either disappointed or disgusted.
Eventually it became clear that the man was working on installing a garden at the house where he lived. The ground had been broken up, fertilizer had been applied, and seed had been sown. When the first tender green shoots began to come up, the people gathered together. In a rage in the dark, they came to the garden and destroyed everything. When the man saw it the next day, after considering both his mission and the season, he decided that it wasn’t too late to start again. He prepared the ground once more, planting in neat rows.
The people came again. This time they not only destroyed the garden but also spread poison over the ground. When the man saw this, he resolutely spent a few days digging the poison out of the soil. When he was sure it was ready, he began yet again.
Meanwhile the people in the town hardened themselves against him. Nothing he did made any sense to them, but they nevertheless waited to see what he would do next. They were furious that the man, who had been sent to help them, had been so selfishly working only on his own garden on his own property.
One day they woke to find that seed was once again beginning to sprout in the garden. This time they gathered as one to decide what they would do. While they did wonder why the man hadn’t bothered to use force to defend his little patch of ground, the angry mob had a momentum of its own now. They set fire the house where the man lived, and when it fell, the garden was buried and destroyed along with it. The man who had come to help the town escaped the flames. When he stood in their midst on the street, the people’s rage abated, if only because of their shock at his survival.
In the eerie light of the smoldering house, one of them asked him, “If you were sent here to help us, why didn't you?”
The man responded, “I have been trying to help you this whole time. You need food to eat. I was trying to grow it for you. And if any of you had come to me and asked me what I was doing, I would have taught you how to do it too.” He turned to look at the wreckage. “And now it’s too late. Even if we all worked together, the growing season is over.”