Friday, October 31st, 2014
THE GARBAGE TRUCK
One Thursday morning I stood looking out my office window at a garbage truck emptying trash put out the night before. The sun was just coming up, and my brain had not yet awakened to the day before me. It was a good time for the planting of metaphors, though the one that arrived was hardly original. I would expect millions of Christ followers have at one time or another thought of emptying trash from a container to be analogous to emptying the garbage in one’s soul. But, how many have taken the next step of actually emptying a particular piece of soul-garbage? Probably not as many; I was one of them that morning.
I had watched a popular TV drama the evening before that held a dark message – lives are expendable if they’re in the way of someone else. I’d set our DVR to record it as a series but hadn’t asked the crucial question – “Is this a show Jesus would watch with me?” – until that morning. It wasn’t, so I walked downstairs to stop recording future episodes.