I consider everything a loss in comparison with the superior value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have lost everything for him, but what I lost I think of as sewer trash, so that I might gain Christ. —Philippians 3:8 (CEB)
I picked up the flyer that had been slipped under our front door and groaned. “They want us to recycle our kitchen garbage,” I said to my wife. We were already sorting our plastic, glass, cans, and paper; now a new citywide program was encouraging us to throw our food scraps into a special bin for composting.
“It’s all about making something useful out of what we throw out,” Carol explained.
Over the next few weeks we got into the habit of throwing food scraps in a bag in the freezer, which I’d take down to the bin in the basement every four days. I’d see lemon rinds, apple cores, coffee grounds, potato peels, carrot stubs, cauliflower stems, artichoke peels, broccoli trunks, tea bags. It’d be amazing if something could be made of my own personal garbage, I thought. My pigheadedness, selfishness, anger, jealousy.
The city picked up the composting once a week, and the recycling became a habit. One day I was walking through the park on my way to work and saw a city truck dumping a dark, moist pile of fertilizer next to a clump of trees. Is that what came of our garbage? I wondered. I walked closer to inspect. It had that satisfying loamy feel to it; it didn’t even smell. Whatever had happened, it had been transformed.
I headed toward the subway where I would settle into my prayer time. Maybe I needed to think of it as a sort of spiritual composting, turning my garbage over to God, trusting in His forgiveness and mercy and powers of transformation.
Lord, thank You for the fragrance of forgiveness You leave in Your wake. Forgive me for all the wrongs I’ve done.
Digging Deeper: 2 Corinthians 5:17
Excerpted from Daily Guideposts 2017.
