Recycling a single aluminum can saves enough energy to power a TV for three hours or run a laptop for five. Just one can – imagine what a whole neighborhood could do!
This not-so-trivial tidbit appeared in the bottom corner of the back page of our garbage and recycling hauler’s monthly newsletter. After wheeling our garbage and recycling bins up the driveway and parking them in their spots in the garage on that rainy Tuesday, I just stood there – stopped in my tracks – trying to wrap my mind around the magnitude of that assertion. Just one can!
As the huge garbage truck added my trash to the load and lumbered up the street – followed by the recycling truck minutes later – my mental calendar scrolled back a few weeks to Earth Day in April, and to Easter Sunday’s message of new life and hope springing eternal!
We live in a town named for a place at the beginning of the Bible – Eden. It was God’s own created world, along with everything in it. In the first three chapters of Genesis, the message clearly asserts that God makes no junk. Over and over, everything created is declared “good.” No garbage is mentioned. Recycling seems unnecessary. We can even begin to imagine what it means to say that we are created in God’s image.
That being said, God proceeds to give us dominion over creation (Genesis 2:15). Our role here on God’s creation is to be faithful attendants to it. As we are “made in God’s image,” our actions are to reflect our divine Maker.
Turning to the New Testament, in Matthew 22:36-40 we find the great commandment, and the second: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
My image of Calvary Hill – also known as the Place of the Skull, where Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem – is that of a garbage dump where all the sins of the world are redeemed … something only God can do, which is much greater than just recycled!
So, as I watch the recycling truck roll up the street to my neighbor’s bins, it’s love of neighbor that becomes my driving force for properly separating trash from recycling. And “just one can” makes a difference.
Editor’s note: Eden Prairie Local News (EPLN) contributor Pastor Rod Anderson also serves on the EPLN Board of Directors. He was the senior pastor of St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Eden Prairie.
Interested in contributing a faith-based column to EPLN? Email editor@eplocalnews.org.
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