Living the Longdrop Lifestyle

I don't know what it's like where you live, but for most of my life I have lived in places where you put all your rubbish in the bin (or in these days of recycling, it might be several bins) and, on a certain day of the week, you put those bins out in the street for the town council or municipality to come by and empty them. Here in the province of Málaga, it's a slightly different system: it's your own responsibility to separate your rubbish into glass, paper, containers and bio-degradable stuff (basura orgánica) and then you take it to the street corner, where a row of stainless steel bins awaits you. Except they're not really bins: when you open the lid and drop your rubbish inside, it actually falls far down into the bowels of the earth - rather like what my African friends would call a "longdrop" toilet. It's simply gone.... never to be seen again! (although one assumes that the town council has a way of getting rid of all those milk cartons and plastic bottles.)

The other day, as I dropped my basura orgánica into the depths of the pit, it made me think about a conversation that I'd been having with a lady that I met last week. This young woman had the feeling that there was too much rubbish in her past and she couldn't imagine that God could ever really forgive her for the way she had lived before she recently became a Christian. As we chatted, I read to her from Psalm 103, which says that God "rescues our life from the pit," and that, because His great love for us is as high as the heavens are above the earth, He removes our sins as far away from us as the east is from the west. A similar verse in Micah 7: 19 says that God forgives all our past sins and "hurls them into the depths of the sea."

As I watched my rubbish fall into the depths of the earth and disappear from sight, I thought that this is the way God wants us to live our lives: He wants us to be quick to recognise our faults and failings, so that He can forgive us and hurl those things far away from us. He doesn't leave them sitting around to remind us of wrong things we did in the past, but He puts them out of sight and out of His mind. By His grace, those who trust Him can live life without guilt or shame. When we walk by our Alhaurin "longdrops,"  my friend and I can remember and thank God for His compassion and forgiveness.