April 3, 2023

Take Out the Trash

Read: Psalm 51 (especially verses 2 and 10)

One of the churches I served had “adopted” a stretch of highway, and two or three times a year we would get garbage bags and put on our work gloves and pick up the litter along the sides of the highway. I remember one morning as we were collecting the litter, I came to a blackberry thicket. I noticed in the middle of those thorns a paper bag. I looked at the bag, and I looked at the thorns that surrounded it and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to get that one little piece of trash and went on my way.

Following behind me, Mr. Gerald, one of the saints of the church, saw the same paper bag and waded into the thicket of briers to retrieve the sack. Upon opening the sack, he found a $20 bill! (He, of course, put the money in the church offering plate!)

This season of Lent is, in one sense, a time for Spring cleaning; a time to check in the dark recesses of our lives to get all the trash out and leave ourselves clean for our Heavenly Father’s pleasure. Sometimes, though, during the introspection, I will discover some garbage in my life. I know it’s there, and God knows it’s there, but I tell myself that it would simply be too difficult to get rid of, of I will justify it as “only one little paper bag,” and go merrily on my way knowing the trash is there.

I hope I am learning that it is, indeed, worth the effort to get the junk out of my life, and that it isn’t just a little thing, but that junk is something that can (and does) fester and poison my soul.

The reward for cleaning out the junk isn’t measured in dollars and cents, but rather as an offering to God, whose Kingdom benefits us all in miraculous ways.

Shalom,
Rev. Will Wells – CGUMC

Prayer: Father, thank you for this season of Lent. Thank you for the time to take stock of our lives and for showing us the junk that that is in our lives. Give us grace to wade in and do the difficult work of repentance and cleansing so that we can be healed, and your name be magnified! Amen