Earth Day, Cigarette Butts, and Epiphanies

We recently celebrated Earth Day with a base-wide clean up.  

As in previous years, the agency organizing the event held a contest between different groups on base with regard to weight of trash brought back to the recycling center.  Whenever there is a contest, people bring out the heavy items.  They get creative in terms of weight by scooping up wet leaves, a few small items in a shovel full of dirt or sand.  It is entertaining to watch the level of innovation that people will put into their efforts when they have something to gain.  (I think it’s akin to the late Eddie Guerrero’s tag line, “I Lie! I Cheat! I Steal!”)

At one point during the morning I was off on my own, relishing a bit of solitude, and I wandered up to this section of fencing that partitioned one parking lot from another.  All along the fence line there were hundreds of cigarette butts.  I'm an ex smoker so my initial response to these types of finds is usually anything but charitable.  But I stooped down and began picking up small butt after small butt, and I knew that my bag of trash wasn't going to be heavy, but that area of the parking lot, in that small area of our base, was going to be clean.

And it was right about then, as I was crouched down, scooping up cigarette butts that I had an epiphany.  Not an "aha moment" epiphany, but a God speaking to me with absolute clarity epiphany. “This is the most important work ever.”

How many people ignore the cigarette butts?  How many people see them and say, "I ain't picking up those nasty things!" ( I only say that because I have heard those exact words from others.) We're very interested in the big items that have lots of weight and offer chances for recognition and we bypass the little cigarette butts but picking up the small things is vital work.  

In my time in the Church, and I still consider my extension ministry being “in the Church” regardless of what others say or believe, I’ve noticed the enthusiasm that folks have for the large scale projects that earn recognition; maybe it’s because large scale projects only require short-term commitment. But when it comes to the daily work of “just picking up cigarette butts,” work that doesn’t get a kudo or a Bravo Zulu, work that doesn’t have some easily noticed, measurable metric attached to it, we just don’t have the attention span or the level of commitment that the work requires; we get frustrated by it because just when we think we have them all picked up, dammit there’s another one!  And--in the end--we just don’t don’t want to deal with “those nasty things.”

As for me, I’ll keep going on with the most important work.