Bill, I heard that same joke with a different punchline...but you have to tell the early part of the joke slightly differently so as to set it up properly. The preacher doesn't see the "before" part, he only sees the "after" part. Anyway the punchline is...

"Ahh..." says the farmer wryly..."Well...ye shoulda seen it when He had it to Hisself!"   ;-)

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All religions, of course, do commonly state that "God helps those who help themselves." One would interpret this to place the responsibility on us humans to do our bit, rather than just sitting around and waiting for a divine hand to somehow set things right. We become the instruments of God when we decide to, but if we do nothing, then nothing happens (except the inevitable results of entropy...which are deterioration and breakdown). It requires effort to resist entropy. Whether there is something that could be termed "God" wich assists us in our efforts is endlessly debatable. As you and I well know. ;-)

I think of God as "life" or "the indwelling spirit of life" (a form of living energy and consciousness that enlivens all living things and sustains them), so it's quite clear to me that the life force within me is what enables me to do everything I do. Still...I have to decide to do something or it doesn't happen, regardless of the presence of the life force within me.

I can decide to do absolutely nothing. If so, then the life within me will presently abandon my body and I will "die". That is, my body will die. What happens to "me" remains uncertain. It depends on whether I am my body...or the consciousness within it. I think I am the consciousness within it, but not the body itself. I think the body is just something like a biological mechanism that I am using at the moment as an instrument to experience this embodied life. And that's temporary.

I have no way of proving it. ;-) No one has any way of disproving it either. And that's okay with me. I can comfortably live with not knowing how to prove or disprove something like that.