Field trips

Someone once said (I think it might have been Ann Landers or Karl Barth) that the most frightening and most comforting words are "this too shall pass." In many ways that is true. Whatever heartache or joy we have will come to an end. 

But it's not technically true.

Today I pondered a different law. I found myself thinking about one of the classical law of physics - the conservation of mass. The mass of an object or collection of objects never changes, nothing can be created or destroyed no matter how the constituent parts rearrange themselves (Encyclopedia Brittanica).  

Yep. That's poop.

There's something comforting and terrifying in that law, especially after visiting the sewage treatment plant. Nothing can be created or destroyed.

I don't know why I insist on taking middle schoolers on such weird field trips, but I do. I want them to connect their daily lives and actions with faith, but sometimes I think I'm just sick and twisted. 

I take them to the sewage treatment plant and ask them to make some connections with baptism. I'm not looking for any profound connection in particular, but it seems like a good opportunity. They made some about being cleansed or caring for God's creation or the need to look for a different middle school group.

For the first time in my multiple trips to the sewage treatment plant, I was struck by how nothing goes away by magic. We may be cleansed and given a second chance, but the %&*$ doesn't go away. In fact, it costs Juneau two million dollars a year to barge our poop down to Oregon. We create 7-12 shipping cartons full of poop a day. I found all that pretty wild.

Yes, we can pull some cleansing waters and second chances out of the filth. But, we still have to do something with our messes because pretending like our stinky stuff magically disappears is a destructive lie. 

Maybe I take the middle schoolers to the sewage treatment plant for the same reason I baptize folks. It's the hope in the midst of the mess. And it takes a lot of courage to look at the mess we make and figure out how to live in grace and responsibility. 

I'm sure most of the youth walked away feeling slightly grossed out and never thinking of "cake" the same way, but I can guarantee that they will also never look at a drain the same either. The crap we leave behind takes a lot of work to clean-up.