Heart of the Problem

When you meet someone for the first time and exchange initial greetings, one of the first things people ask is, “What you do for a living.” I’ve discovered that when you answer that question with the words, “I’m a Pastor,” it’s an absolute conversation killer. So to try to avoid that sort of conversational suicide, I’ve been trying to think of different ways I can explain my vocation without immediately losing people.

Recently someone said to me, “What do you do for a living?” and, a little experimentally, I replied, “I’m in the recycling business.” They were very pleased with that, people like an environmentally responsible vocation, so the next question naturally followed, “What do you recycle?”

Do you know what I said? “People!” Then I quickly added, “Actually, I don’t recycle people. I work for Someone Else who does.” It got us talking. After he realised I hadn’t been recently released from a mental health institution, he said “I thought when you first said 'recycling', you meant you were doing your bit for the environment.”

“I am.”

“How do you mean?”

I said “Which is the better way to look after the environment, to pick up and recycle rubbish that has already been dropped or go right to the heart of the problem and change an individual’s motivation, change a person on the inside, so that they no longer want to drop rubbish and but desire to treat the world with a sense of care because they have come to understand it belongs to God and they are responsible as one of his stewards?”