Kirkepiscatoid

Spring is really here, because half the town is putting out stuff on the curb for "Kirksville City-Wide Cleanup." (The other half will do it next week.) Every year, people can basically just dump anything and everything (minus a few flammable and explosive things) to the curb and have the city pick it up. I have always joked that there's no "clean up" to it...we are all just trading our stuff back and forth!

Now, since I don't live within the city limits, I don't get to put anything out to be taken away. But this time of year I often cruise the streets watching for goodies. Already this year, I found a perfectly good CD/DVD player in a box of junk. It's a seasonal treat, only here for a couple weeks and gone till fall.

Some even postulate that scavenging is hard wired in our human nature. Possibly a long suppressed survival instinct. But of course, the norm has always been that dumpster diving is not a "polite" activity so mostly those of us who love it keep it underground.

Oddly enough, I was, today, in my daily "spiritually cogitating time" thinking about this. Scavenging is a two-edged sword for me. At one level, I have thought about the difference between how scavenging during Kirksville spring cleanup is acceptable and downright "resourceful", since you are scavenging through things no one wants, and scavenging to survive, which is far less desirable and not well accepted. At another level, I wonder how much "free stuff" God puts out to the curb, with a hunch that our natural scavenging nature will just "pick it up?" Do we pick it up, or do we say it's not good enough, because it's at the curb?

Can someone else's spiritual trash be our spiritual treasure, and all it needed was the right owner?

In the big cities, gangs like to "take over dumpsters" and make dumpster divers pay for the privilege. Even this can be exploited. How many times does "organized religion" make us feel like we have to "pay" for what we should be able to pick up off the ground for free?

I think about all those serendipitous moments in my life where God just kind of "popped up while I was driving by" and it made me stop and explore the box it is in, just like how I was driving down the street many times on cleanup days and spied something at the curb that made me stop and explore what else was there. In those moments, I wasn't really driving by to scope out the curb. I just saw it. A lot of times AFTER I saw it, I actually DO start looking, and find nothing as good as the thing that just "popped up."

That's kind of the magic of God's grace. Sure, we look for understanding of God, but the grace just pops up, and we are amost never "looking for grace."