Recycling

Recycling has gotten to be an obsession with me. I feel good about recycling. I feel excited about it. Why do I feel so excited? Right now my major effort is recycling citrus fruit that otherwise would not be picked. It is still going on, despite the fact that citrus is already blooming and budding for this fall's crop. Some trees still have last year's crop on the trees. This fruit will eventually shrivel up and drop off if not picked. Amazingly most of that fruit on the trees is still good. Citrus stays ripe in the trees for months. I know of many grapefruit still in trees. There are oranges too but orange trees are taller. I cannot reach most of the remaining fruit.

There are also plenty of sour oranges. People largely do not pick this stuff. Kids probably pick them to throw at one another. I am working on ways to use the sour oranges. You cannot eat them. They make your mouth pucker they are so sour. But orange pies are excellent. They take some effort though. I have also developed an orange aide that is not half bad. But it's an acquired taste. One third juice, two thirds water and add 1/4 cup of saccharine for sweetener. Not too sweet and dietetic for me. There is also sour orange marmalade. It tastes pretty much like regular marmalade.

As I go to my car I see other evidences of recycling, leaves and grass from bags left for trash, soil washed out of yards and into the gutter on the side of roads. Getting that soil is pretty hard work. Soil is heavy. A man walking by saw me shoveling soil into a container last week and just shook his head. Yeah I'm crazy.

As I walk for exercise I find some fairly interesting things to reuse. I am pretty obsessed.

In the home we accumulate a lot of stuff. When I am straightening up I find a lot of things that have not been used for years. I either think of some way to use them, place them in a box to take to Goodwill, or toss them. I imagine Goodwill tosses a lot of this stuff without trying to sell it. But that is there problem. I do not give them broken things, just unusual ones. Things that would take imagination. Yet I believe there is someone out there who would pay a little for it. But I admit these things would be hard to move.

I am constantly looking at the food we have in the freezer and pantry to see how to use things long forgotten. If they are still remotely edible I will think of a recipe to use them in. Sometimes I have a great time combining seasoning where we have two containers of the same thing. I love doing that too. We also have lots of little body lotions and body washes. This morning I tried to combine some of those. I know the scents are different. The girls will howl. But these lotions are long forgotten. They were not going to use them anyway. I might use them, just to get rid of them.

In a broader sense jail ministry is about trying to recycle people. That is not as easy. The results are not as readily apparent. So one has to enjoy the process. Helping at the retirement home is similar I suppose. These people are often forgotten by others. And they need visiting in any way possible. People need "recycling" in a sense, we all do. In this context recycling means discovering or enhancing someone's talents and virtues. They are there. God knows it. They are not getting used as much as they could be. Be at peace with that.

I am going through Hebrews right now (Chapter 2 and 3). I've been missing my daily Bible readings lately. Salvation is like recycling to me as I have expanded the meaning of the word. Jesus has redeemed us. His redemption is big. The writer says we (they) will regret having walked away from so great a glory. Jesus is both high priest and victim. He suffered, he was tempted. He redeemed suffering. He overcame temptation. There is recycling in there.

Last night we read and meditated on Isaiah 43:1-2 which starts, "Fear not for I have redeemed you." God did a recycling project on the Israelites. He took them from the Chaldees and chose them. He saved and redeemed them out of Egypt. The second verse says when you are over your head in water, when you go through fire God will be with you. You will not drown or be burned. God will save you. It is a promise first for the Israelites but do we take this to be a promise for us as well? I think we do. I know I do. God is always with us. He is in the process of using and reusing us. Perhaps that is why I like recycling so much. I think it is a model of how God takes us, broken as we are and finds a use for us. I find that so exciting.