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Taking Out the Trash
by Jerry Ousley I get up each morning, get ready for the day, walk into the kitchen and there it is. The trash. Where does it all come from anyway? How can we accumulate so much garbage in a twenty-four hour period? We have two trashcans behind the house and each morning I take the refuse from inside the house and stuff it into those two cans. By the end of the week I begin to wonder, "How can I stuff in one more bag?" I think about where it all comes from and surprisingly there are several sources. First of all the mail takes its share of allotted space. Each day we put more paper that has been mailed to us in the trashcan than what I call "keepers." The keepers consist of an occasional letter, perhaps a personal card of some kind, but mostly keepers are made up of bills that have to be paid. It makes you wonder why they are really "keepers" doesn't it? Then when Deb cooks there is always a lot of stuff to throw away. Did you ever wonder why they do all that packaging? If you really think about it all those attractive printed labels, and extra plastic wrappings that immensely add to the cost of food all goes one place We empty the contents and dump the packaging in the trash. It takes up a lot of room and we ultimately pay to get rid of it, so why should we be paying to get something that we are going to just throw away as soon as we use it? Only in America. When we decide to clean out a drawer or corner of the room it is absolutely amazing how much stuff we have put off throwing away. We know we'll never use it but for some strange reason we think that we should keep it for a while. When cleaning day comes it always gets thrown away along with the words, "What was I thinking when I saved this? I should have known that I'd never use it," and in the can it goes. In the town we live in they have what's called "big trash week" once a year. During that week you can sit almost anything beside the road that's legal to throw away and they'll pick it up. It's almost fun watching what people put out at the end of their driveways, but it's even more fun to watch others drive by in their pickup trucks, going through all that stuff like they're shopping for new clothes. The old saying goes, "One man's junk is another man's riches." One year my Dad set out an old microwave oven. Needless to say it didn't work. Before the end of that day it was gone. No big deal, Dad meant to throw it away so if someone could get some kind of benefit out of it, well, good for him! But the next day when he walked out to get the mail, lo and behold, the microwave was back. Whoever picked it up found out it didn't work and had the gall to return it. Getting rid of trash can almost become an art. It takes skill to break those boxes down so as to get maximum fill in that big black bag. I pride myself on being able to break down and roll up those big pizza boxes into a 2" x 2" x 6" rectangle. God takes out a lot of trash for us. He is the Master of dumping the junk. We all have things stashed away in the corners of our lives that are long overdue to be thrown out. Don't be fooled; even Christians poke things in corners that shouldn't be there. God has a way of illuminating those cobweb-covered secret things. It may embarrass us that they are there when we discover them, but that's one of the things Christ came to do for us empty the trash! Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge. Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com |