“ We want our town to look nice, to be a pleasant place to live and sometimes that means you have to roll up your sleeves and work.”

S T R A N G E F U N

By David Mears Pastor, St. John’ s UCC

On Saturday June 15 th I volunteered to help with the Clarence clean-up. It may sound strange to call riding the garbage truck and picking up trash fun, but it was.

So here are some observations from a morning riding on the garbage truck.

It is true that one person’ s junk is another person’ s treasure. The piles that we picked up Saturday were considerably smaller than the piles I noticed as I drove around Friday night.( Even my pile got smaller!) I imagine that some things were rescued and repurposed, and some other things were sorted through for scrap value. Either way, a lot of things were recycled and that is always good.

When my brothers and I were growing up, my father had a running joke with us three boys. He would say,“ I don’ t care what you do,

just do it as well as you can. I don’ t care if you are the garbage man, be the best garbage man you can be.”( No offense to garbage people intended, we actually thought it would be cool.) Anyway, I called my father on Father’ s Day to tell him I had finally lived his dream for me. For a few hours I was the garbage man and I did it as well as I could.

When my son worked for the city one summer, I used to tease him that one day I wanted to ride the garbage truck because it looked like fun. He informed me that it was only fun for a few minutes. Well, he called on Father’ s Day and I told him that I finally had the chance to ride on the garbage truck and it was fun, but he was right it was hard work.

Throughout the morning, those of us who volunteered were having fun with this opening line: So a policeman, a mayor, two council members and a minister are riding the garbage truck … There has to be a joke there somewhere but we never really finished it. Maybe you can write the rest of the story.

But seriously, it was fun. It was also reflective of some

things about small town life. We want our town to look nice, to be a pleasant place to live and sometimes that means you have to roll up your sleeves and work. You can’ t wait around for somebody else to do it.

It is really that way in every community, it takes a willingness to work at creating the environment that we want and what God wants for us. We have a role to play in the creative and recreative process and we are called to be stewards of God’ s creation.

Let me know if you figure out the punch line to the joke, I know that there is a joke there somewhere!

Enjoy summer, enjoy God’ s creation!

JOYFULLY SMILING!