Dumpster Divers

Dumpster Divers

I watch out my windows here a lot.   I see a lot of oldsters taking care of napsters.   They make the circuit in our apartment courtyard, the easily led pushed along by the nearly dead.   As they walk, two or three trash bins are in view.   More often than not, the geriatric set will stop, lean over, peer down, and dig around.    Look for treasures.   Never can tell what might be in there,

Watching this Discovery Channel out my window has been instructive as well as entertaining.  The folks that are dumpster divers are also survivors of their own intense history.   They are the few who remain after forty million fellow citizens st*rved to death in their generation.   The most common greeting when meeting a friend amongst this age group is, “Hello, have you eaten yet today?”  Giving and receiving a meager bit of food often made the difference between living and dying.

My mentor mother back in the USA I’ve come to call “MM” for Mother Mine.  Harriette’s an expert is taking her little trolley down on tracks in your interior and emerging hours later triumphant with goodness.    She mines the mind with an eye for treasure; dives into apparent dumpsters and surfaces with jewels.

Makes me think:  what trash have I examined lately, looking for treasure?  When I talk with you, do I sort through your words for value, something glittering?  When I mine my own mind do I discard slag and grab the one pearl?

I joke that as a psychologist I am a waste management engineer.   I help folks get rid of stinking thinking that produces poopy feelings.   Even my name, Vance, comes from the old English for “thresher”, the device that sorted chaff from wheat.

          Jesus too came to claim his treasures from amongst great piles of evil.   He had an eye for those who had an eye for Him.   Those who received him became his treasure. He peered, dumpster dived out of heaven to earth, claimed bits of glitter for Glory.   Will you join him, and me, today?  Maybe that’s what being missi0nal is all about—not geography?      

Happy Christmas Dumpster Diving!

Vance Bethyl Joy