How Picking Up Trash Saves the World

I pick up trash now.

I didn’t use to, but I do now. At my house, at work, in airports, on sidewalks, in streets, in bathrooms. In all these places, I find little bits of refuse that sit idly by, wearily eyeing each passerby much like a cautious puppy in a dog pound. Tinged with fear, but also waiting in anticipation for the man or woman who will send them to their proper resting place.

Six months ago, I moved into a new apartment. My landlord warned me about it at the time; I thought I knew what he was talking about. But I didn’t know until a few weeks after I had moved in. Much like the convenience store that didn’t carry Dapper Dan in O Brother Where Art Thou, my apartment building is a geographical oddity. It is not two weeks from everywhere, but it does sit squarely at the confluence of two mighty rivers of advertisements.

I have never received as much junk mail and flyers for local eateries and barber shops and newspapers and beauty shops in my life. It is as if the world is a funnel into which someone is tossing advertisements, and our building is at the bottom of it. It is absolutely insane. I go to Supercuts. I like their work. I don’t want to switch barbers, and you would think that if I wanted the LA Times, I would have ordered it by now. And if you are the proprietor of a local nail salon in the South Bay, and you are reading this, I am not interested.

I began seeing the flyers in particular strewn across the ground outside my front door. They are not put there to begin with, mind you. Marketing people know that piling trash outside your door is not the most effective means of targeting customers. No, they actually start out stuffed into the screen doors on every unit in the building. But they are not content there. Before long, these nimble young cards get the itch to do a little exploring. So they hop down from their safe perches and venture into the unknown wilderness of concrete. Wandering to and fro, dancing in concert with the song of a gentle breeze.

I typically picked up my flyers and threw them away. And I began noticing that some of my neighbors were not doing likewise. I would see a flyer one day, and it would be there the next as well, and the next, and the next. They became regular acquaintances. And I would walk by each day and nod in their direction, never wanting to stop for any length of time to talk or anything, always just good for a quick “hello” and a head nod. Until, one day, a thought struck me.

“You are the light of the world.”

If my neighbors left their flyers on the ground each day, and they just walked right on by, not willing to deal with something they know they probably should, or just ignoring the issue altogether, then what does it mean for me to be the light of the world? How am I to be set apart, to be different, to be counter-cultural, to be a revolutionary? How am I to actually be what Jesus said I am?

So I decided to start with picking up their trash. Each day, as I walked past these small reminders of my faith, I quickly bent over and picked them up. Nobody has gotten saved yet. I don’t think anyone has even seen me do it. But that is not even the point. I do know that this is one way I can live differently from the world. This is a small decision that I make each day to be faithful to my calling.

I draw some inspiration for this from C.S. Lewis who is, perhaps, my favorite author. In his seminal work Mere Christianity, Lewis offers this thought:

…every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature; either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself…Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

What I have learned about picking up physical trash is that it has made me more sensitive to dealing with my spiritual trash as well. The tiny little act of obedience each day, just being open to doing something differently than I normallywould, has opened the floodgates of opportunity to live a life that is different. How I spend my money, the car or house I want, how much I care about my salary, or getting promoted, or an office with a window. My relationships to friends, or my dating life. My eagerness to talk to people about God. My patience in adversity, my peace in stressful conditions. My joy in harder times. My hope in the routine of life. Every day, opportunity after opportunity, I have hundreds of little choices to make, each one giving me the chance to grow a bit more into the likeness of Christ, or each day, to become more like the man I was, the man He saved me from.

I had this one particular airline upgrade coupon for at least a year. I kept it folded up in my little leather ticket holder thing that my Mom bought for me in high school. It did not quite fit exactly; it actually stuck out to the side just a bit. It also had some weird sticky residue on it, and I am not sure where I picked that up or what it actually was. Anyway, this coupon was to be used for a one-way upgrade to first class for trips up to 1000 miles. Most of the flights I have take are longer than that, so I could not typically use it, but I did have opportunities to do so and just never really got around to it.

At the time of this story, the coupon was set to expire in 29 days. I had just finished a hectic day at work in Chicago, and I was pretty tired, and I was on my way to Eagle, Colorado to go skiing with my aunt and uncle and cousins. I had flow into Denver and was waiting for the little hop over to Eagle. I didn’t know how far away Eagle was, but I was pretty sure that it was less than 1000 miles. This coupon was my golden ticket.

Sitting there in the airport, realizing that I still had this coupon and could use it for a nice little first class action, I was reminded of Jesus’ teaching to love others as much as we love ourselves. In keeping with this thought, I decided to use the coupon to upgrade my seat and then give it away to someone, hopefully without telling them who did it. I thought that maybe that would be a little choice that I could make that would make me more like Jesus and less like myself. So I walked up to the gate agent, smiled at her, and said, “Hi, is there first class service on this flight?”

She glanced up at me, fatigue spelled out clearly in her countenance. “Yes.”

“Great. Is there room available?”

Another tired look. “No, but I can put you on the waiting list.”

“OK, thanks.”

Still tired. “How would you like to pay for this?”

I handed her my sticky coupon. It was a little hard to hand over, not because it was sentimental to me, but because it was sticky.

As she read the coupon and began typing into her computer, I leaned in and quietly said, “If a seat opens up, and you move me to first class, can you give the seat away to someone else?” She looked back up at me blankly. “Because I don’t really need the seat. I’d rather someone else have it.”

At this point, her face shifted from fatigue to contortion. She looked as if I had just told her that I was a dining table and she was a llama and I wanted her to teach me how to play the piccolo. Complete gibberish, straight out of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s Improbability Drive. After all, as she apparently realized, dining tables can’t play the piccolo. She didn’t really even say anything back to me. She just sort of made this face and looked at the ground and looked back up at me and back at the ground again. After a few very uncomfortable moments, I decided to walk away.

I have found that there is nothing quite as disconcerting to others or satisfying to me than to do or say something that is completely unexpected. It gives me a certain sense of satisfaction, knowing that I am noticed for being different. I know that God has called me to humility as well, but I am trying to deal with that, and that is another topic.

Still, being different isn’t all it is cracked up to be. The fundamentals of Christianity just don’t make sense if you want to get ahead or even live a normal life. Deny thyself? Why? I like myself a lot, and I like to do what I feel like doing. If a man strikes you on one cheek, turn the other to him. What? If someone hits me, I want to level them. Give to those who ask. Are you kidding me? You don’t know how hard I have worked for this money, and you expect me to give it away to someone else?

If you have not ever read the Bible, or you have not read it in a while, or even if you read the Bible every day, go to Matthew 5 and read the Sermon on the Mount. You will find the world’s greatest lecture, wisdom densely packed into a few short chapters like matter into a black hole. This sermon is so incredibly unnatural. It makes complete sense at the same time that it makes no sense at all.

It seems like a lot of friends and counselors and co-workers tells us to “be ourselves” all the time. Like when you are going on a first date, and you are kind of nervous, and your friend says, “Just be yourself.” Or you are going into a job interview, and you are not sure how you are supposed to act, your Mom says, “Honey, just be yourself.”

Jesus, unlike our mothers, tells each one of us: “Don’t, under any circumstance, be yourself.”

He seems to know something about us, something very intimate and shameful. He knows that we are not as good as we think we are, or as good as we think we ought to be. He knows the part of us that we don’t show to others, the part of us that we often don’t reveal even to ourselves. It is “us” in our truest sense, the “us” that isn’t good, the “us” that lurks beneath the polite and self-effacing and charitable exterior. He knows that we are wicked.

Most people I encounter tend to think of mankind, in general, as being good. If you asked one of your friends, or some guy on the street, or perhaps even your mother, “Do you think that people are basically good?” chances are they will say “Yes.” We have an unnerving tendency to cater to the façade of this world, consciously or sub-consciously glossing over the simple and pure fact that we are almost always looking out for ourselves. Our love of money and pleasure and comfort and revelry is blatant. Our reticence towards building meaningful relationships with others is more subtle but equally appalling. Even our purest attempts at charity and chivalry are tainted by our self-aggrandizing motives. We are spiritually fat, lazy, and selfish. We ignore the silent, desperate pleas for love and acceptance by the poverty-stricken. We turn a careless, blind eye to the injustices that surround us. We watch idly as our children and friends are waylaid by the empty promises of a fallen world. We are, quite simply, wicked.

The prophet Jeremiah tells us that “the heart is deceitful above all things and is beyond cure.” Beyond cure. God tells us that our hearts are sick and will never be healed, so long as we live in these earth suits. Yet we deceive ourselves into thinking that it cannot be so, that we are really not all that bad. How telling it is that the most common explanation of fault is “I’m only human.”

This is why we don’t pick up trash, and this is why we don’t care about the needs of others. But God has the best news that people like us in the condition we are in could ever hope for from a Doctor. He has offered us a new heart. He says, “I have taken your heart of stone, and I have given you a heart of flesh.” He offers to show His love through us to others. He offers us His wisdom and His way of seeing the world. He offers us the last thing we want and the first thing we need.

That is why Christianity represents something that no drug or relationship or sport or business or bank account or vacation or religion can match. It offers satisfaction and joy on a level that is light years away from normal. It is not because it is exclusive, or because it feels good. It is not because we are right and they are wrong. It is not because we get something out of it.

It is because the most honest thing we can ever say is “God, I’m not who I pretend to be. I’m not who I want to be. I’m sorry for ignoring it for so long. I need You in order to be me. Accept me as I am, love me in spite of myself, shower mercy upon me.”

It is because God has chosen in His great love and mercy to open His arms and welcome us in, comforting us and telling us it is going to be OK, that He loves us anyway and we will never have to be alone again.

It is in those honest moments, cloaked in spiritual nakedness before the Almighty God, that the light within us begins to burn its brightest.