Usually my husband takes the family trash to the dump, but he was sick, so I made the drive. I actually kind of enjoy this chore. Trash gets hurled into one dark hole of a bin, but there are several others waiting to receive plastic, glass, metal, and paper. What happens next, I don’t really know; but they say it all gets recycled somehow. I don’t think too hard; I just throw stuff into the right hole and trust the process.
Like so many Gen Xers, I have a complicated emotional relationship with recycling. We grew up absolutely flooded with exhortations to recycle, and saw many, many illustrations of the process: A smiling child tosses a juice bottle into a green bin, and it smoothly emerges seconds later as two elegant wine glasses. Or sometimes the global nature of the system was emphasized: A rising tide of grimy, tattered, worthless trash threatens to swallow the earth, until it’s collected and crushed into formless potentiality. Then a cloud hides it from our sight, and it is all reborn as tidy stacks of sparkling, desirable consumer goods. Recycling will save the world.
I still recycle, and I definitely still think it’s worthwhile to reduce and reuse as much as possible; but I’m way more cynical about what actually happens when we toss something into a recycling bin. Some of that transformative magic does happen, especially with metal and glass. But a lot of it is more complicated. There’s a lot of waste, a lot of fraud, and a lot of inefficiency, and I don’t blame people for wondering if it’s not all just a giant scam, especially with plastics. Much of the push to recycle, it turns out, was really a push to use plastic.
But wow, the imagery in all those optimistic PSAs was compelling. Sometimes the recycled trash would straight up transmogrify into a flower — usually some kind of daisy, a clean, white blossom adorably stretching its leaves like a child waking up from a dream. A yawn, a stretch, and a pop! Beauty, fresh and new, sprung forth from a heap of what was once refuse.
That image is so nice. Isn’t it nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if things really worked that way?
Oh friends, have I got good news for you.
Every time we take a sin and give it to God, he makes it into something good. Every time we take our suffering and pain and sorrow and offer it up, he makes it into something beautiful. This is a foundational truth of our faith, of human life: Nothing needs to be wasted. Everything can be transformed. All you have to do is give it to Jesus.
Thus endeth the part of this essay that can easily be read in a youth minister voice.
What Jesus does is not recycling. Even in the ideal recycling scenario with no waste or disfunction,, the best that can possibly happen is something undesirable gets its materials rearranged into something more useful. And that’s good! But what you get still just a product, and it can never be anything more than that. Eventually, everything manufactured will run out of reboots and will have to be trashed. It is the blight man was born for. Even recycling can’t stave off moth and rust forever.
Jesus does not recycle.