Clean Living

For the third morning in a row we have awoken to the sound of silence. I strain my ears to hear something - anything - but our cozy little bedroom is silent. Not just quiet, but silent. A total lack of noise pollution. No fans, no air conditioners, no traffic, no neighbors... no neighbor's dogs!

Each morning I walk out into the pre-dawn darkness to marvel at the brilliant stars hanging low in a crystal clear sky. We have no yard lights, no porch lights, no street lights... At night when we go to bed the moon shines so brilliantly that one can see the yard almost as clear as day, but after the moon sets, the stars take over. There is no light pollution, nothing to interfere with the vast array of twinkling lights hung by the Creator in the night sky for His and our enjoyment! The Big Dipper is almost straight overhead, pointing out the North Star, halfway to the horizon. Stars which we seldom have seen over the past twenty years.

For the past several nights we have sat in our new little living room, enjoying the warmth of the fire in the furnace there. We have relaxed quietly or spent the time dreaming and planning for our next steps as we unpack and settle into our little house on the prairie! As of yet we have no Internet connection and no TV. In some ways we wish it could stay that way. There is something remarkably refreshing about being so isolated from the rest of the world. (I did turn on the radio this morning to hear the weather... probably the first time in years that we listened to a radio when we weren't driving! Besides the weather we also got the latest round up of grain prices and some farm news as well!)

One of the noises and smells from Singapore that we will not miss is the garbage truck coming around every morning to pick up the trash from our apartment building. But what does one do with one's garbage when one cannot just walk down to the end of the hall and drop it into the waste chute? Do you realize how much garbage we deal with on a regular basis? Probably we have more than usual right now as we purchase new things and unpack our old ones. In any case, one becomes much more aware of the trash in our lives at a time and place like this. Fortunately there are some options for recycling, and so we have started carefully separating out the paper from the plastics from the whatever...

It's kind of a funny thing about life isn't it... We long to get away from the pollution that others bring into our lives - not just noise or light pollution, but also the unending garbage of every day life in our world as we know it. But even if we can isolate ourselves from all the outside pollutants, we still have to deal with all the trash that we ourselves produce. Even if we can get away from the physical pollution of life in the 21st Century, ( I recall a village we visited in Cambodia that was so poor that it was almost spotlessly clean... they were too poor to even have any garbage), we will never get away from spiritual pollution because we carry it with us and produce it ourselves. The good thing is that when we have Christ in control of our lives, we not only have less trash to begin with, we can also trust Him to be faithful in getting rid of the trash we are willing to admit we do have.

Isn't it great that our Lord Jesus Christ is into recycling!