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on dumpsters...

I struggle with dumpsters. I feel my frustration mounting even as I'm tying the bags off inside the house. It's as if I'm conditioned to experience presentiments of frustration that I know I'm doomed to encounter, only minutes later, as I attempt to take my trash where trash should be rightfully taken. I carry the bags to the dumpster. I try to hold the lid up off the dumpster and toss the bag in. This works—sometimes—provided that the bag is filled mostly with paper towels and junk mail. But on those I-just-cleaned-out-the-refrigerator days, the weight of the resulting trash bags increases exponentially. On these days, I am frustrated. I try to lift the bag while holding up the lid. I can't lift the bag one-handed. I attempt to lift the lid off the dumpster first, with the hope of then having both hands free to toss the bag in. This never works. I lift the lid, but the weight of it, coupled with it's proximity from the ground and my own insufficient 5' 2" reach, prevents me from lifting it all the way over to an upright position. I give it a hearty shove up into the air. It goes half way. It falls down. It spashes mysterious dumpster dew in my face. I know this, and yet I try it anyway, every time. At this point I often attempt to lift the lid with one hand and toss the bag with the other again, as if, by some miracle, my sheer will to lift the bag has actually affected physical law. It's a peculiarity of man that we continue to try the things we've tried before, expecting different results. After resigning myself to the fact that neither of these approaches will work, I kick off my sandals, shimmy up the fence post, bracing myself between the post and the metal ledge of the dumpster. I lift the lid and pray I don't fall and break my leg. On this day, I'm successful. Then begins the free entertainment for the neighbors—spinning around like a discus thrower, trash bag flying, working up enough momentum to actually get the bag into the dumpster. If I'm lucky, the bag doesn't break during this process.

On Thursday, my perspective on dumpsters was changed.

That evening, for reasons I won't explain, I found myself on the roof of a very large building. I sat perched on the edge, looking down at the street below. A man came out of the building carrying some cardboard boxes which he promptly tossed into the dumpster beneath me. In all my struggles with dumpsters, I had never seen trash from this angle. It was fascinating, really, as far as looking at trash is concerned. I looked into the dumpster, and I noticed how recognizable the items inside seemed to be. A bit of a chair. A two liter of diet coke. Cardboard boxes. The man carrying trash to the dumpster was, much like myself, not tall enough to see inside of it. Indeed, my perspective on the trash was positively unique in this way. Once released, he could no longer see the trash. He thew it in. It disappeared. I can't imagine he wanted to see it again.

On the stoop of my front door, with two dear friends, I listened in silence to the sound of the April rain tapping with fluid rhythm on the roofs overhead. We had been discussing times and events in our lives toward which we, for whatever reasons, felt regret or bitterness. We discussed how many of these experiences had been redeemed and become a powerful part of our testimony. How many of the worst experiences we'd ever had, the most painful, would become the one thread to connect us with someone else, somewhere, sometime—in desperate need of someone else who understood. There, with our liquid cadence, I recalled the man and the dumpster. I recalled looking down, seeing it all so clearly from above.

Is this not how God sees us?

We related tales of broken homes, divorce, depression, alcoholism, self-hatred—the trash in our lives—which we never seem to see clearly but through God's graceful retrospect. But God sees from the beginning, sees now, sees always.

Looking down from above, the intricate and delicate connections—our trash for what it is, and for what it was meant to be. The beauty that our dumpster is common. The beauty that our trash connects us. The beauty that we may all come to the dumpster to throw away that which we want to forget, but instead, through his profound design, find our fellowship there.