Legalistic rubbish

In the small community where I live, there are three choices for trash pick-up. The first and second companies are decidedly more expensive than the third, which is why we chose it. The rub is that the third company will only pick up the trash inside our two company-issued trash cans. Items left outside the can will be, like unbelievers in the popular book/movie series, left behind.

Two weeks ago, we placed all of our trash in the two cans, except for one flattened cardboard box, which we slipped neatly between the two cans. My husband then watched as the trash man left the comfort of his heated truck to place the box, not in his truck, but back into our can, apparently to rot until next week's pickup.

Last week, a bag of trash fell out of our can when the truck's automated arm lifted it to the truck. The trash man drove off, leaving the bag on the road. It was, after all, outside the can.

I know the trash man feels he is just following the rules. He wants to enforce company policy, keep his nose clean, and stay employed. So far so good: We knew the rules when we signed up and shouldn't be mad at him for simply doing his job.

Where I take issue with my trash man, however, is my sense that, given the opportunity, he would jump at the chance to run his big truck over sinners like us for continually placing our Raisin Bran boxes outside the approved zone. Putting items back in our can or letting them spill seems intended more to slap us a lesson than to lovingly instruct. So, rather than wondering why we had so much trash this week or what the garage is going to smell like if the trash isn't taken away, he convinces himself that he is in the right and that by holding that line, he will eventually change our ways.

It is here that I see myself. Busy monitoring my neighbor's trash can or spiritual state, I often bring him to task for doing nothing more than being a fallen sinner. And, in this graceless state of tongue clucking, I give lectures and logic and legalities. I forget that, while I am busy breaking the Greatest Commandment of all, God is about the business of picking up all my own filthy trash---inside the can or not---and taking it as far as the east is from the west.