Spiritual Composting Revisited

I was planting spinach and pea seeds in the garden a week back, admiring the rich loam of the garden, the product of years of adding compost to the heavy clay soil. The ingredients of the compost were well broken down except for the occasional peach pit or a partially decomposed peanut shell that would be gone in another year. Running my hands through the soil, I unearthed an object I've come to think of as the Curse of the Black Pearl. (No, nothing to do with the first (and best) of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies...)

Composted Black Pearl teabags, three to five years old

Lipton introduced a specialty line of tea a number of years back, lauding the flavor and the high quality of their tea leaves. I tried one flavorful black tea sold under the name Black Pearl. I loved the tea, had coupons for the new product, and over the next months bought and drank a lot of it. Since I'd composted all my tea bags for years, I automatically tossed the used bags of the new tea into the container on the kitchen counter, the first stop on the way to the backyard composters. Lipton, for whatever reason, decided for this new line of tea to abandon their traditional paper fiber bag/biodegradable string/paper tag and replaced them with a nylon pyramid-like bag, a nylon string and a plastic tag. Years later, these tea bags, like virulent weeds, are still showing up in the soil of my garden - bag, with tea leaves still inside (!), string and tag as intact as they were the moment I pulled the bag out of my teacup. I have become resigned to the fact they will never decompose and will only disappear if I pick them out of the soil, one by one, and throw them into the trash.

A year ago* I wrote about spiritual composting, how God, over time, uses the debris of our lives, layered with His grace and mercy, tossed by His Spirit, to create a rich soil for our future growth. But what to do about the truly unusable, the “Black Pearl teabags”, that persist in our lives? We all know what it is to deal with sinful debris, the natural consequences of living in a fallen world. And God often does work in our lives through that debris. But there are things we find in our lives at times that need more drastic action, that feel more like SIN rather than just sin. Jesus words in this area are strong and direct and sound downright brutal:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30, ESV)

Pretty strong stuff...

Looking at the same words in an idiomatic translation, things don't soften much:

Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump. (Matthew 5:29-30, The Message)

Still pretty strong stuff - “Let's not pretend this is easier than it really is...” So let's not. For the sin in our life that is persistent, ugly and resistant to change, there is only one solution, not easy, but fortunately for us, blessedly simple. We have a Savior, One who went to the cross for both the sin and the SIN in our lives, (for aren't they both really SIN?), One who bought us freedom and forgiveness for all the stuck places in us. We can call out, cry out, to the God who saves, the only One who can show us how to pluck out and dig out the undecomposable stuff, more deadly than any bad teabag - the addictions, the lust, the anger, whatever – and lay them at the foot of His cross. And when we do, humbly acknowledging our helplessness in dealing with such things ourselves, we can experience a freedom that gives us new appreciation of the profound depth of meaning in the “Good” of Good Friday.

If the Spirit of God has given you a vision of what you are apart from the grace of God (and He only does it when His Spirit is at work), you know there is no criminal who is half so bad in actuality as you know yourself to be in possibility. 

                                           - From My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, June 1

 

* April 26, 2013