A businessman well-respected for his financial advice was making a speech several years ago. I don’t even remember his name — I just remember hearing this story.

He was trying to make this point: We all make miscalculations in judgment at one time or another. Sometimes we don’t give an idea a fair chance, and don’t have enough faith.

He described being at a meeting many years before where a couple of people were trying to persuade those in the audience, including him, to invest in their new venture. They needed capital to make it fly. They didn’t have enough money of their own to see their idea through.

As it turns out, the captain of industry telling the story passed on that venture and walked away without investing a dime. He was sure that soft-serve ice cream would never sell. The people running the meeting he walked away from went on to found Dairy Queen!

By the same token, who would show up and pay money to eat liver and onions? It’s one of those foods that a few people like, and many people don’t. Perhaps your grandparents kept the liver and fixed it for dinner when they butchered a cow, but that tradition has long faded away. Many people leave it at the butcher shop today when having a calf processed. Somehow it doesn’t rank up there with fish-fry fish, Southern fried chicken and giant, breaded tenderloins.

In God’s hands
That makes what the Petroleum Methodist Church has accomplished all that more amazing. For the past seven years, the small church located in a tiny town in southern Wells County on Indiana Highway 1 has held a liver and onions supper on a Saturday in February. They serve fixings, too, but liver and onions are the star of the show.

Does anyone show up? You bet. This year’s seventh annual liver and onions supper on Feb. 11 drew 400 people in less than three hours. Steve Stauffer, who helped organize the first dinner and still assists, says they fixed 150 pounds each of liver, onions and potatoes, and served them all.

It didn’t start out as a fundraiser, so there is no admission price. There’s a free-will offering box at the start of the line, right next to the lady serving liver and onions. You get liver and onions whether you put anything in the box or not.

This year’s supper generated over $3,000, Stauffer reports. “And to think the whole thing started just because I wanted to clear the liver out of my freezer left from people buying beef and leaving the liver,” he says.

He put it in God’s hands from the very start. Obviously, God is still using liver and onions for his church.

But you can’t measure success just in the amount of money raised, Stauffer insists. He notes that through the years, church members have bonded together, laughing, literally crying and just having a good time preparing liver and onions.

Best of all, some people who now belong to the church first became acquainted through their experience with the liver and onions affair.

Who says God can’t use all things for the betterment of his kingdom?!