Grandma’s heart was beating hard. Too hard for its own good, she thought, but she smiled.
Her grandson was coming today. She wiped the icing off the edge of her thumb and laid the dispenser tube on the counter. Standing back, she admired her handiwork.
She’d been up since dawn baking cupcakes. Now they sat in a line on the counter, their rich whole-grain goodness glowing in the shaft of morning light from the kitchen window.
They had come out perfect. She had made them just as her own grandmother had shown her. Their tops were covered with a heavy layer of tiny star-shaped icing bubbles, each carefully guided into place with the icing tube while she hunched over them, biting her lip in the morning stillness. They had to be perfect. Her grandson was coming. She felt young, girlish in her excitement. She imagined his pleased face. To know that she had made them just for him. She smiled and blinked away the mist in her eyes. Her grandson was coming.
****
“Look. Look what Grandma made for you,” the younger woman cooed. “See, she made them just for you.”
The little boy inched forward, his hands in his pockets, his bottom lip protruding a bit, to eye the cluster of white-frosted cupcakes. “See,” his mom cooed. “Grandma made them just for you. Go on, get one.” She gave the boy a gentle push. He eased forward, looking over the white frosted display, then grabbed the biggest one.
“Tell Grandma thank you, Johnny.”
“Thanks,” Johnny muttered, licking at the thick frosting.
“Come, let’s go out on the porch,” the younger lady said. “He can eat it out there without making such a mess.”
“Yes,” the older woman said slowly. “Yes, let’s. It’s such a beautiful morning.”
They sat on the porch swing, the old woman and the younger one, while the younger talked vivaciously about many things and Johnny stood by the rail licking at the icing.
“And then,” she said, “I was looking through that new magazine and I found the perfect purse.” She smiled, the dimple creasing her cheek. “I didn’t really need another one, I guess,” she said, laughing self-consciously. “But it was so perfect and my birthday was coming up so I thought—”
Splat.
Both heads turned instantly.
The cupcake lay splattered on the porch boards, its golden core scattered on the fading gray wood.
“Johnny!” The young woman put her hand to her chest. “What happened? Did you drop it?”
“Don’t want it,” Johnny muttered, his protruding lower lip extending to new dimensions.
“Don’t want it? Grandma made them just for you. Why doesn’t Johnny want it? Tell Mommy why Johnny doesn’t want it.”
He shrugged and kicked at a golden crumb with the toe of his new sneakers. “Icing was good,” he muttered, turning away. “Didn’t want the rest.”
****
The sun was just sinking behind the old bank barn as the older woman slowly put the cupcakes into the container to take down to the pantry. She needed to take them down now and go to bed. But somehow, she couldn’t. She just stood staring down at the glazed little cakes she’d iced with so much love and anticipation this morning. She swallowed hard, blinked, and swallowed hard again. I need to put these away, she thought. I need to go on to bed. But somehow, she couldn’t do anything but stand there staring at the little works of love, blinking again and again and swallowing at the lump in her throat.
****
I pulled the trash can to the end of the lane again. The garbage truck comes early in our neighborhood, often by shortly after five. Though I’m up by then, if my wife doesn’t remind me to take it out the evening before, I forget to get it out in time in the morning.
Tonight, as I pause at the end of the lane in the evening coolness, surrounded by the sounds of birds chirping their sleepy night sounds, the whole process fills me with a sense of unease. How does one household produce this much trash? I wonder. Something must be wrong with this way of living. In my current position, there are no simple answers, but still, it bothers me. Single use packaging. Food that has gone bad. Me forgetting and leaving good food in my lunchbox again, then forgetting to tell my wife it’s there that evening and then it goes bad: it all adds up. Something, I think, is wrong. I don’t like it. Don’t like it at all.
****
America is the most wasteful nation on earth. In food waste alone, we waste “nearly 60 million tons—120 billion pounds—every year. That’s estimated to be almost 40 percent of the entire U.S. food supply, and equates to 325 pounds of waste per person. All told, the amount of food wasted in America has an approximate value of nearly $218 billion—the equivalent of 130 billion meals.”[1]
Those are staggering numbers. They are unacceptable numbers. They give even the most committed industrialist a momentary pause. In a world where 10 million American children struggle with food insecurity, never mind all the children around the world actually starving, to throw that much away seems wrong. Even immoral.
****
The immense crowd fell silent. As the Master stood, the five barley loaves cradled in His hands, He turned and looked up to heaven. “Father, we thank you,” He said, His voice warm, present, as if speaking to a close friend, “for this gift from your hand.”
It was an hour later. People stood and stretched. Children, their stomachs full, rested their heads sleepily against their mothers’ sides. A baby asleep in his father’s arms slowly relaxed, his little fingers releasing the fragment of barley loaf to tumble to the ground.
And then Jesus did something puzzling.
When they had eaten their fill, He told His disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.”
Why, I wonder, did He tell them that? It’s particularly interesting because it is both a command and an explanation. We are not entitled to explanations when God tells us to do something, but sometimes He gives one anyway. “Gather up the leftover fragments,” He says, “that nothing be lost.”
Multiple explanations can be offered here as to why Jesus gave this command.
Maybe He wanted to prove for all posterity that His ability to provide was not only enough to feed 5,000-plus people but could create abundance over and above the need. Picking up the excess scraps certainly proved that.
Maybe He didn’t want them taking any excess home as a symbolic lesson of God’s abundant grace for today, grace that cannot be stored until tomorrow.
But He gave a reason for what He was doing. It was so that nothing would be lost (or wasted, as many translations put it).
Maybe (probably) there were poor people there who, present hunger satiated, tucked the last of their barley loaves into their pockets for tomorrow’s inevitable hunger. To think that the disciples were going around prying the last half of a barley loaf out of some poor child’s fingers to toss it in the leftover basket defies imagination to the point of lunacy.
Jesus, in His own words, merely wanted nothing to go to waste.
But why? He could create bread out of thin air if He wanted. He spoke the cosmos into existence. He represented an unlimited supply. A bottomless well of resources. Why would He care if a half-eaten barley loaf got tossed under a desert shrub?
But what if . . . what if it wasn’t about the bread? What if it was, as He obviously viewed it, a gift from God? Was it because the bread mattered, or because He was the type of being that did not waste God’s gifts? Because waste is a moral problem?
So often we view waste only as a problem if it will cause a shortage, but what if that is beside the point?
As I read recently, A gift is precious not because of what it is, but because of who did the giving. . . . Think of a child picking up a pretty stone on the beach, then handing it to a parent or sibling. . . . A material thing given personal consequence through a simple act of generosity.[2]
What if God’s children simply do not waste because they see waste as an insult to the Giver?
****
Today, we throw everything away. In fact, many items are made for the express purpose of being thrown away. We call them disposables. A whole slice of American industry is dedicated to creating things to throw away.
It started simply enough. When my grandfather was young, drinks came in glass bottles, and the tiny crimp-on lids were pried off and thrown away. The bottles themselves were recycled, rewashed, and refilled. This was no minor afterthought as it is today. People took it seriously. My grandfather and grandmother used to walk the roadsides to pick up bottles and turn them in to collect the recycling fee to buy, in at least one case, a stick of butter.
During the Great Depression, about 3 percent of food was wasted in America. Today that number is 40-50 percent. And those disposable bottle caps, now it’s the entire bottle. And . . . much, much more.
William Painter, the inventor of the bottle cap that created his wealth, told a younger man, “Find a way to create something people will use once, then throw away. That way,” he pointed out, “you always have a continual supply of new sales.”
The younger man listened. He created and marketed the disposable razor blade. His name was King Gillette.
Now it’s disposable everything. Plates, cups, spoons, knives, bottles, razors—the list goes on and on.
Now it’s also completely normal. We are not even surprised when, at a family gathering, an entire meal is set with disposable everything. Everything from the drink containers to the centerpieces, all the silverware, and everything on the table, including the tablecloth, is simply wadded up and trashed. Oh, and the food . . . lots and lots of food. The Master is not here saying, “Let the fragments be gathered up so that nothing be wasted,” . . . or, if He is, no one is listening.
****
In my own life, I still don’t have good answers. But the longer I think about it, the more I realize why I get that feeling of unease when I pull the trash can to the end of the lane.
The most important reason is because of our casual attitude toward the blessings God has given us. Why do I have such a problem with some child creaming the top off the cupcake, that loving gift from his grandmother, then tossing the rest? Do I have any legitimate moral grounds for outrage? Are we doing better? Am I doing better?
There is something else as well. It has to do with what all this disposing is doing to our personhood . . . to our essential being. I fear all this disposing has gone systemic and has become a core part of who we are, as our everyday activities tend to do.
I’m afraid for a culture that views things as something to be used and then dropped when we don’t want or need them anymore . . . or don’t think we do.
How deep within my personhood has this thinking penetrated? Today, in the society around us, everything is potentially disposable. Cups, plates, electronics, vehicles, houses, friends, children, and spouses are simply dropped when they are finished with. “She was no longer meeting my needs,” a man might explain with a shrug, referring to the disposal of his marriage, if he even feels called upon to explain it at all.
Of course I would drop her, he thinks. She was no longer meeting my needs. In other words, “I’m done. I don’t want the rest.”
We haven’t started that yet, thank God, but I wonder about some other things. How easy is it to simply change churches these days? In some Anabaptist circles, going to a better church is as simple as turning the other way at the end of the driveway Sunday morning. Sure, there is some other messy stuff like membership status that needs to be worked through, but all in all it’s a pretty straightforward process.
Employees, jobs, fellow church members, church affiliations, and old ways of living that have served the church for generations are fine as long as they meet our “needs.” When they don’t, we drop them like an old but still working electronic device tossed into a drawer to make way for a new one with better features.
****
Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know what to do. A creeping unease disturbs us. Something is wrong. Something about the way I’m behaving or living is improper. It’s not right living.
If we are honest, we will find ourselves in these places in life. What we do with them matters . . . a lot.
When faced with an apparent truth with no simple answer, it causes a deep unease, an internal turbulence, and a desire for things to go back to normal. What we do with that is critical. There is a strong temptation to shrug it off, to rationalize it away.
This is a mistake. It’s bad enough to find things in our life that are not as they should be. To see that failure of what we need to be. To see and viscerally feel the shortfall. But to lower the standard, to start explaining that bad feeling away, is far worse. It is self-deception.
Sometimes no answers are apparent, and we don’t know what to do. It’s important then to simply sit with the discomfort. To allow its presence in our lives. To acknowledge its right to be there. It’s important, vitally important, to allow truth to be truth. If we do that, we maintain the possibility of growth. The door is open. Maybe something will come along to clear things up. Maybe a way will open that has hitherto been closed. Or maybe a solution is near at hand but unseen, like Abraham’s ram caught in the thicket, waiting to see if we’ll lie quietly and tolerate the raised knife.
Because these moments, like many other things, should not be wasted. They must not be discarded. They represent not just discomfort but, within the pain, an opportunity. The cracking of the shell that imprisons us. A small but real metamorphosis. A chance to once again slip through the shell of our imprisoning self into the cool stillness of His presence.
[1] Quote from https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/#solutions
[2] Quote from page 142 of the book Fewer Better Things by Glenn Adamson (Bloomsbury Publishing)
