One Man's Trashcan, Another Man's?

John 10:10

The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

Trash night is Wednesday night. That is when I roll my own portable Gehenna (no it is not smoking) to the curb. Gehenna in the Biblical times of the OT and NT was the the city garbage dump--it was also the place of child sacrifice. I don't kick my trash to the curb....I roll my trash to the curb. That saying of kicking someone to the curb references treating someone like trash....rolling someone to the curb could be treating someone like trash, prim and properly, a la Martha Stewart.

I thought I was going up the social scale by getting wheels on my trashcan. How middle class! How bourgeois! What a wus! My old cans were more blue collar Columbia...my new cans? Middle class Mountville. I used to drag my trashcans down my driveway like carcasses, now it is more like a hearse.

There was a day, a child, when I didn't like to take out the trash. I'd let the can become a decaying pile of refuse, getting higher and higher, like a tottering skyscraper of filth, wobbly in the wind. Which of course made me even less inclined to want to take it out. And, so on, and so on. Now, as my wife will testify, I have the whole transporting from the kitchen-to-the-curb trash removal system down to science. It has become a spiritual metaphor for me, take out the trash--don't let problems pile up and rot away, causing a stench and drawing vermin. Get rid of it, deal with it. My wife comments that my trash taking out prowess one of the things she likes about me.

Imagine my dismay the other day when I got home on Thursday afternoon to discover that our trashcan was M.I.A. Sometimes the wind can send the can to the neighbor's yard, so I went for a run to look around. I noticed that everybody else's can was where the trashman threw it. Ours? Gone, AWOL. Had someone had stolen our trashcan? I was dismayed. It was disbelief tossed with anger...all sitting on a platter of idiocy. I couldn't think of a suitable analogy to compare it too. A big screen tv, an expensive bicycle left accidentally outside, a case of beer in the garage, I can understand. But, a trashcan? I thought, "That is pretty pathetic...the "trashcan bandit" brings shame and dishonor to his kith and kin. I feel sorrow for him that he would endanger his soul over a trashcan."

G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy writes that "The thief compliments the thing he steals, if not the owner of them." So, I considered that I should feel flattered that the trashcan thief picked our trashcan, of the many strewn about around the block, as the most worthy to pilfer.

In the New Testament, Satan is called a "Thief" by Jesus. Satan's PR office Wormwood and Associates would rather present him a liberator of humanity, a Robin Hood-like rebel shattering the shackles of God's aristocratic autocracy, an "ancient Che Guevara,", righteously stealing the Promethean fire and giving it to man. No, he is a dirty THIEF.

Well, campers, the trashcan story has a happy ending. I was certain that the trashcan had been stolen and I had even written a draft of this blog entry this way. But, then my neighbors came over from coffee and one of the guys told the other guy that he had his trashcan. The neighbor who had our trashcan had been out of town all week and his daughter had found our trashcan and put it in her family's garage for safe keeping until dad got home. I welcomed our trashcan back into the fold. We are ready to roll once again.

John 10:10 (King James Version)