Unpacking Ideas

Our earth and its contents and dynamics are complex and beautiful. When I stop long enough to notice, I am in awe. OK, its also true for me that in my next breath I say “thank you God for this beautiful and complex creation.”

For the worms, what begins as garbage on Friday is transformed into rich waste on Sunday to be used for new life in my garden or potted plants. Friday’s waste becomes Sunday’s rich soil. That’s the theology of Easter weekend. Christ has died (Friday’s decay). Christ is risen (Sunday’s rich soil). Christ will come again (Hope for a better life “next weekend”) .

I was listening to NPR the other day and heard about a family in Great Britain who changed the way they dispose of their garbage.  They became recyclers.  Totally.  They changed from recycling nothing to recycling everything – glass, plastic, food scraps, urine (OK, maybe not urine, but you get the point).  I was embarrassed as I listened because I am not (yet) [...]

We need hope. Lots of people need hope. I am thinking about the children in Haiti tonight. They need hope. Tens of thousands of them are new orphans. They just lost their moms and dads. They are alone. Children. That’s a lot of trash in their young lives. That’s a lot of decay. But I have hope that God’s love for those kids is enough. I have hope that even though the children have been ripped from the safety of their homes and families — somehow, someday, they will feel safe and loved again. I learned this from my worms.

The impossible takes longer, whether we are talking about kitchen garbage or personal garbage, worms or the transforming power of God’s love. My personal garbage requires a few worms too. And it takes a bit of time because I have plenty of garbage accumulated over the years. Can my garbage be transformed into something rich? Sometimes we call this redemption, when God consumes my personal garbage and makes something good out of it. Seems impossible, and it might take a little longer. I’ll wait.

Effective leadership watches over slow change carefully and patiently — without losing sight of the mission and the need for the change to continue. Effective leadership also understands the juggling act of watching over and nurturing individual change while also monitoring the entire organization’s slow progress toward accomplishing its mission. Mission-mindfulness and change are hard to maintain. They are hard to measure. They are even harder to measure if we care about the health and well-being of our individual members as well as the health and well-being of our entire organization — because the two are not necessarily the same.

Two dogs, a cat, bats, two deer, and 250 worms, all in one very odd backyard moment. Linda, my wife, joined me in the backyard. She saw the dogs, cat, bats, and deer and smiled. I told her about the worms. She did not seem to mind the worms. Two dogs, a cat, bats, two deer, 250 worms, and a wife. A wonderful backyard moment.

 More Than Worms This is about more than worms.  I am obsessed with composting1 in general, with or without worms.  Did I tell you I discovered maggots in my compost bin?  In horror I rushed to the nearest Cooperative Extension website where I learned of a composting expert at Oregon State University2 .  I’m sure other universities have compost [...]

The big question is whether or not we talk about worms.  I can compost with worms, or without worms.  Are we really going to talk about worms?   My father-in-law gave me his old compost bin. (Thanks Herb!)  This bin is a large cylindrical container into which I dump a lot of garbage, like fresh grass clippings, household vegetable scraps, horse manure, [...]