Garbage...

One of the things that I (don’t) enjoy doing is pushing myself to run in the middle of the heat of the day while the sun is beating down. 100 degrees, no cloud cover, middle of July in Texas. It is a true test of my grit. Number one, I despise running, it’s painful, it takes too long, the results from it are very limited and hardly noticeable unless…I am running, and because I don’t like to do it, it is not pleasurable at all. I don’t have any spiritual moments, I don’t listen to podcasts or informative topics because I actually need the energy from intense music to keep me moving. I don’t even like listening to anything that is not building or developing my spirit or my soul and giving me a greater advantage in my life and affairs. Anyways, why do I do it then? Because I need to crucify my flesh to discipline. Any time I sense my mentality is weakening and I am allowing myself to complain, avoid difficult tasks, procrastinate, or even show a glimpse of mental laziness in business or in life, I know that I am tending more towards pleasure rather than pain. In life, you are going to have two pains, the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. As an entrepreneur, I am able to control what I do with my time, and without maturity, this could be very destructive to my life. I must keep myself focused on the things that I need to be doing that will produce the right long term outcomes that my life demands. If I begin to decline in these disciplines, it is very difficult to change the momentum and swing the pendulum back towards success. Everyone is different, but for me, I don’t like to make disciplining my flesh a long process. I prefer to stack habits, go on a crash course of boot camp like intensity, and get things in order as soon as possible. I begin to fast daily, eat cleaner so that I can rid myself of the desires for carbs, fats and sugars, and I do my running in the worst part of the day with no food in my system to fuel me. Some might say that is crazy, but I see how other people try to ease their life into order and they never get there. When you take months to get things gradually in order, you leave a tremendous amount of room for outside circumstances to take you off course. I’d rather have my habits established, my discipline intact, and priorities quickly aligned and then encounter whatever attempts the enemy or life has to test my perseverance and my faith. My flesh belongs to me, it is the temple of my spirit, and will willingly dictate to me what my priorities are if I allow it, but I don’t and I pay close attention to it so that I can keep it in order. Anyways, back to my story of running. I try to end my run roughly a mile away from my house so that I can take about 20 minutes to walk and cool off while my heart rate drops back to a reasonable level. While I was heading back, I noticed that there was some trash littered along the path. We live in a very nice neighborhood. The eighth hole of a world class golf course is right outside of my front door and I regularly get the opportunity to observe golfers chip and putt to finish a beautiful par 5 hole. The standards of the community and the surrounding area are fairly high so you don’t typically see garbage littered across the sidewalks and side streets. People here care about where they live and they have a higher level of respect so they don’t litter trash all over their own neighborhood. It’s not a gated community, but it could be. It’s interesting to contrast ghetto’s which I have lived in, and gated communities. The standards with which people uphold are typically much higher. People in gated communities would never allow trash in their yards, sidewalks, common areas because it’s not respectable and no one that has achieved the level of income it takes to live in a place like that would want to live in a dirty neighborhood. They care, bottom line. In the ghetto, it amazes me how people will just throw garbage out of their window, toss it aside while they are walking, and just leave messes for someone else to clean up. It’s a strange entitlement that they seem to have. A mentality that believes that the government is supposed to send an employee to come in and clean up their own streets and make them look according to city standards. The individuals that live within the community act like they don’t have any responsibility in caring for where they live. The two communities only have one thing that separates them…their mentality. The Bible says that both the rich and the poor have one thing in common, God created them both. I believe what King Solomon was trying to say was that they are both made from the same thing and they both originate in the same place. The difference between them is how they exercise their free will. This is not a story about economic outcomes, although in a different message I am sure we could create much debate on the correlations, but this is more or less a story of the people within different communities taking appropriate responsibility to maintain those communities and keep them in proper order. You see, as I was walking I noticed something was out of order so I decided to pick it up and carry it with me. I actually began to pick up several pieces of garbage along the way back home. It is my community, and although I was more than a mile from my house, I live in this area, and I don’t appreciate seeing trash everywhere. Someone drove by and tossed it out of their window making a declaration that they didn’t care about the community, or the laws that govern the community. The rest of us would have to live in a place that is dirty if we didn’t choose to clean things up when we noticed them. I know most people just complain, but I work towards solutions even if it means I am the one picking up the garbage on my afternoon run. My mentality is that it will bless others and bless me to see a cleaner neighborhood. It also sets an example for anyone else who is watching. It shows them that I am not too good to reach down into the ground and clean up the trash that contaminates it. In fact, it is a duty and I am honored to uphold a standard even if no one else will. Integrity is when you do the right thing, because it’s the right thing, especially when no one else is looking…except this time, someone was looking…and interestingly enough, it was actually a sanitation engineer, or a garbage man. As I was nearing my turn to go into my culdesac, I heard a big diesel machine pull up next to me and slightly ahead of me. The door swung open and the gentleman driving the truck looked at me, and held out an unopened water bottle, he then told me to toss the garbage in my hand into the back of his truck and that he would take it from there. This man sat in air conditioning and drove a machine that picked up garbage barrels for him for a living. He must have seen me picking up trash along the side of the road and it did something to him…it set an example, it moved him with compassion and he was compelled to bless me. That bottle of water was extremely refreshing and it was at the perfect time…I needed it, but I wasn’t even thinking about it, I was just serving my community because it was the right thing to do. Isn’t it interesting that God will send you a messenger to refresh you when you least expect it. The interesting thing is, it was on a Tuesday and the garbage trucks run on Monday’s in our neighborhood...what was he doing there? At that exact time? To somehow see me picking up garbage and desire to give me an ice cold bottle of water? Come on…tell me God isn’t interested in the details of our lives that we aren’t sure he even notices…I can assure you he is interested in the little things. But he is also interested in the big things, like the matters of our hearts. He tells us to guard our hearts because out of them flow the issues of life. Is the soil of your heart well maintained? Do you monitor the garbage that other people attempt to throw on it? Do you litter in our own heart and just expect the government (Jesus) to send someone (Holy Spirit) to come and clean it up? Do you spend time investing in and protecting it so that it will not be contaminated by the elements of the world and its system of entitlement? Do you bear the ultimate responsibility of it? Isn’t it interesting that as you ponder these questions you might begin to realize how lazy and apathetic you can become in the disciplines of what it takes to maintain a healthy environment in your heart? Maybe you need to take your heart on a boot camp-like crash course to bring yourself into a level of discipline you haven’t seen in yourself in a while. Clean up the trash that is influencing it and make sure that your words are not littering it with garbage either. The scriptures tell us that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks…if you want to know whether you have allowed your heart to look like a ghetto or a gated community, just observe the words that you are saying when under any sort of stress or pressure. Take an inventory of where you would like to live and realize that your destiny demands the mentality of a gated community when it comes to the landscape of your heart, and that other people are watching to see what example you set. It might be hot, uncomfortable, completely against your desires, but at the right place at the right time, God will send someone or something to minister refreshment to you and remind you that He cares and He is watching.