Five Minute Friday :: Waste

Hey look, we're getting Boston Clean!
trash receptacle from Y2K (or whenever)

• Five Minute Friday :: Waste Linkup

Even at our most insecure, most humans have learned some things must go into the wastebasket and into the landfill. Sometimes they're worn out and we need space for new necessities, other times because that "stuff" literally is detritus, trash, garbage, and not remotely useful any more. In fact, some of that "stuff" maybe never had real purpose or usefulness.

I love to remind myself that God never wastes anything. Not a single smidgen of our experiences, including mistakes, missteps, wrong way streets. Including disappointments, devastations, and disasters. Both ours and everyone else's! (Talk about reassuring.)

God eventually reclaims every fragment of what even in retrospect still look like blank years. They still feel like zeros to me because … I have't yet gotten a reassuring "aha!" moment that those were productive times with incubating ideas and ripening resolves getting ready to express themselves and help change the world. The theological reality is those months and years simply looked blank, and now I'll be filling them in with content that otherwise never could have been. Or is it?

Partly yes. Partly not yet.

God's death-resurrection dynamic promises days and years of endless kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. Those golden veins form a new, more subtle, surprisingly beautiful creation the original couldn't have imagined.

• But the Lord said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9

• Ye shall have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept; and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a flute to come into the mountain of the Lord, to the mighty One of Israel. Isaiah 30:29

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My grace is sufficient for you
for my power is made perfect in weakness.
2 Corinthians 12:9