A Christmas Thought About Love And Garbage

Sunday I dug in stinking kitchen garbage up to my elbows looking for a photo of — what else — a cat.

Our garbage men come but once a week, so seven days worth of garbage accumulate between one garbage pick up and another.

When grapefruit rinds, onion peels, celery tops, coffee ground, egg shells, chicken bones, all the ashtrays we’ve emptied — when such stuff sits in the garbage can for a week, it reeks.

That didn’t stop me.

I sifted garbage piece by piece by piece looking for that cat’s photo.

You see, Ginny’s favorite cat, Jessica, is long dead (a dog attacked it while Ginny watched from a distance).

That cat had lived with us for years.

It treated us with utter distain but Ginny treasured the creature.

But, alas, Ginny only had one single small photo, about two inches square, of that cat. She kept it in a little kitchen magnet frame bordered with flowers and tiny birds (which the cat would have eaten).

The kitchen magnet attached the photo of Jessica to our refrigerator.

Sunday, Ginny noticed that the frame was empty.

The photo had slipped out.

The cat was gone (how like it!).

How long has the photo been gone and where did it get to?

We checked under the refrigerator and in all the nooks and crannies all around the kitchen floor.

Maybe, just maybe, the photo had slipped out of the frame and fallen down into the kitchen trash can.

Only one way to find out.

I’m a not a cat person, but I am a Ginny person, so I stood one garbage can next to another and carefully transferred ripe garbage from one plastic bag to another. With my bare hands I examined every ounce of garbage.

I got my hands filthy.

As I worked, an odd thought occurred to me:

Out of love for us, Jesus got His hands dirty too; God came to earth to seek and to save the lost. He dealt with garbage too.

Sometimes, that’s what love does.

He injured His hands digging through garbage.

Nails.

Hands bleeding.

St. John wrote, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins”.

I know that the Scripture refers to Christ as “The lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world”.

Nevertheless I wonder, I just wonder, if the day He came into the manger, just might not have been the day He took the lid off the garbage can.

Incidentally, I did not find the photo of the cat.

I’ll keep looking.