As a child, I remember commercials trying to educate people on what trash is versus what trash is not, as if people really didn’t know the difference. Everything they showed was trash, from the cigarette butt flicked to the road to the fast food wrapping paper tossed into street to the bags of trash falling out of a truck.
During the 1980’s a national movement was underway to clean up the roads and highways. Commercials were produced with the then popular Oak Ridge Boys lending their voices for the theme song, “Take Pride in America.”
When I lived in Tennessee in the 90’s a State-wide campaign was in place to raise awareness for the amount of trash on the side of the highways. I remember a heavy man wearing a tank top driving a convertible down a road. His car was full of trash and as he was going down the road the wind blew the trash all over the highway. It didn’t help things that he was throwing some of it out himself. They called the guy in the car, “Tennessee Trash.”
Following the flooding in Scioto County, keeping Highway 335 impassible, one of the disturbing aftermaths was the amount of trash that lined the highway and other main roads. Finding the source for all that trash might be hard to determine. But it feels like the trash simply gravitates to water.
For the past couple of months, it seems like all I’ve seen is the line of trash accumulating beside the road, and with it comes two concerns. First, something is disheartening when considering how apathetic people act about the trash, and their disregard for creation by throwing trash to the side of the road. As a society, we’ve lost our pride in the beauty of the earth. Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.” Our world does not belong to us, or even to the next generation, but we’re caretakers of our world for God.
Secondly, the trash by the side of the road will eventually make its way into the rivers and streams, and ultimately to the ocean. The trash will kill the land, and in turn kill us too. Have you seen the videos of the amount of trash that is collected out of our oceans? One source says that 5.25 trillion pieces of (plastic) trash floats on the surface of the water, or 800 million tons of (plastic) trash. How does one begin the process of cleaning up that mess?
We may not be able to stop the big corporations and companies from polluting the land and water, but we can stop being the cause for our trash reaching the waters. We can stop throwing trash to the ground, and we can be mindful of picking it up as well.
I remember the first time a trash problem was evident. It’s not like I’d never not seen trash before that time, but I never noticed the extent of the trash until college. As a child, and when my mother was not around, I remember finding glass bottles on school playgrounds and I’d shatter them because it sounded cool (if mom saw me do that, I’d not be alive today, and if mom reads this, um sorry mom). But when I was in college, my brother and I travelled to the Florida beach for a summer holiday weekend. As we swam in the ocean, I was horrified by the amount of beer (and maybe Coke) bottles and trash floating in the water. Who uses the ocean as their personal garbage disposal?
The Old Testament carries a rich theology of the land. How Israel took care of the land was in direct proportion to their relationship to God. Second Chronicles 7:14 links repentance to God healing the land. In the same vein, Numbers 35:33 warns against polluting the land, and how its result has spiritual consequences. Leviticus 18:24-28 describes the land as having vomited out it caretakers because of their idolatry, and warns Israel its fate for participating in the same rebellious sin. Maybe what the Biblical narrative is telling us is that the way we treat the land is in proportion to the way we treat God. If we’ve polluted the land, maybe it’s an outpouring of the pollution in our own lives.
I once participated in a “adopt a highway” campaign stretching by the church I was preaching for. We got out and spent an evening picking up trash. It wasn’t fun, but the company was. It was hard work. And the stretch of highway looked a lot better. Maybe picking up trash is a simple reminder of cleaning the trash from our own lives.
Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e. only God is glorified!)