The Sandwich Initiative

The Parker family is finishing a meal at a card table in their backyard when a friendly argument breaks out over whether eating outside counts as a picnic. Neighbor boy Wyatt Perkins wanders in and settles the debate by claiming that "picnic" comes from a Greek word meaning "food on a blanket" - a fact, Olivia later discovers, that he made up on the spot, as he often does. When the meal ends, the three Parker kids carry in only their own plates and hurry off to play, leaving everything else behind. Their dad, David, who has just been leading family devotions about taking initiative, sees an opportunity. Instead of cleaning up, he decides to leave the extra ham sandwich sitting on the table to see how long it takes the kids to notice a need and handle it themselves. His wife, Eva, warns him that his "great ideas" rarely turn out great, but the experiment is on.

At devotions that night, David teaches from the story of the Good Samaritan, asking why people walk past needs and leave messes for others. The kids miss every hint he drops - Matthew decides the real lesson is about the aliens in Space Raiders 3, who ate Earth's cities and never cleaned up. So David issues a challenge: find something that needs doing, and do it without being asked. The next day the kids play frisbee within inches of the now-rotting sandwich without a second glance, and their reports on the challenge are hopeless - Olivia counts washing dishes, which is already her chore, and Matthew brags about passing the syrup. Meanwhile David grows strangely obsessed with his experiment, having Eva film daily video reports on the decaying sandwich, complete with narration about ants building a mayonnaise swimming pool and the question of whether "future archaeologists find it embedded in the fossil record." When Eva begs him to throw it out, he compares himself to Thomas Edison; she replies, "The deterioration of your sanity is the more fascinating research."

The kids do improve, treating their mom to a surprise in-home spa day, but David pushes them to look for needs outside the house. With Wyatt's help, they settle on cleaning up the run-down park at the end of the street, which Wyatt says the city will tear down if it isn't cleaned soon. The four of them haul out nine bags of garbage and plan to spend all of Saturday finishing the job - until a passerby tells them the city is tearing the park down next week anyway to build a brand-new one. Matthew groans, "You mean we did all this for nothing?"

Wyatt makes it up to them with cookies and lemonade at his house, where the Parkers admit the cleanup was actually fun. Then they overhear Wyatt's mom explain she has to work late, leaving Wyatt home alone - and they learn that his dad is a Marine who was deployed to the Middle East last month, and that being alone scares Wyatt, which may be why he visits the Parkers so often. Without any prompting, the kids ask their parents if Wyatt can stay at their house after school until his mom gets home. David is thrilled: this time the initiative came naturally, with no devotional assignment in mind at all.

Finally David confesses that the whole point of his scheme was just to get them to throw away the backyard sandwich. The kids reveal they noticed it all along - they simply assumed that since Dad kept filming himself with it, it was some kind of experiment they weren't supposed to touch. Defeated, David is told by his own children to go toss the thing out, and Eva assures him that Thomas Edison's kids probably misunderstood him too.