All-You-Can-Eat Day

Today is what my Dad refers to as "All-You-Can-Eat" Trash Day here in Grandview Heights, Ohio. Every Wednesday the good folks who come by and get our trash pick up the standard fare of lawn bags and whatever fits in your standard garbage can but today is different. Today, the Wednesday after the Grandview Annual Garage Sale is All-You-Can-Eat Trash day. The guys who pick up what we leave behind were met today with furniture, old bikes, and just about everything else that didn't sell at the sale and now finds itself on the heap that awaits our "Sanitation Engineers." Residents of Grandview are given this privilege - to throw away just about anything - once or twice a year and by the looks of the trucks and the piles they really take advantage of it.

While there is a comment perhaps to be made about materialism and being good stewards of our money and resources I am going to avoid making it. Rather as I drove around Grandview today I was struck by the shear physics of it all...where did these people find the space to store all this junk? But then it hit me as I passed the broken down dresser next to the pile of what I assume used to be a trampoline, I have my own massive pile of "discard" hanging around my life. I have junk up to my eyeballs and if I curbed it all it would compete right along side Grandview's finest. Yet I think that there is something to be discovered deeper here, something that we can learn from All-You-Can-Eat Day.

How much junk do you fail to curb every time you get the chance? How many grudges or wrongs do we store right along side the love that we hold within us. The truth is that all of us need to do a little Spring Cleaning. Part of what we believe as Christians is that when we confess to God, those things that continued to build the gap that separated us from God, are wiped away and the walls that separate us from God and one another are totally destroyed. For God, sins are not only forgiven, they are forgotten. Imagine the pile of junk that could sit outside our homes waiting to be carried away forever? This is the beauty and wonder of confession - every day is All-You-Can-Eat Day! Let's put it all out on the curb.

Peace,
Brett