Once upon a time there was a poor peasant family that had worked for years scrimping and saving to buy a piece of land of its own. Finally the day came, and they took possession of it. The mother and half a dozen children gathered in the two-room shack that would serve as their house, while the father walked the length and breadth of their land. He paced it out, marking the four corners as boundaries, praying in joy and thanksgiving as he walked. As he rounded the last corner and laid the stone in place he noticed something sticking out from under a bush.
He bent and scratched at the dirt, digging with his hands, and soon unearthed the corpus from a crucifix. It had obviously been in the ground a long time. Its hands and arms were gone, and its feet and legs missing. It was mangled, scratched, cracked, and paint nearly all gone. He picked it up and carried it back in his arms to the house. It was a good size corpus. The crucifix it hung on must have been ten or twelve feet tall. He came in and laid it on the kitchen table.
The family stood around it, looking at it, in an awkward silence. The father explained that he had found it on their land. It was the first thing he had dug out of the ground. What should they do with it? Should they take it to the church and give it to the priest? Should they burn it? Should they bury it again? They all stood and looked at it.
Finally, the youngest spoke: “Father, I have an idea.”
“What, my child?”
"Why don’t we hang it on the kitchen wall and put a sign underneath it.”
“What would you put on the sign?”
And the youngest told them. There was a long silence.Then the corpus was hung with care on the whitewashed wall of the kitchen and a small sheet of paper was tacked underneath. It read: “Jesus has no arms or legs. Will you lend him yours?”
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