This is as close to swearing as it gets around my house and I'm not going to tell you who says it, just that its not me. Usually.
Truth is, I've been thinking a lot about the mess lately. It started with Sherah, the ah-maz-ing woman in I Chron 7:24 who built (drum roll please) 3 cities! A close examination of what all was involved for a bi-racial woman from a family with a bad reputation to build 3 cities in the Bronze Age led me to believe that she probably started by herself with a shovel - digging sewage trenches.
Poop. She had to plan for removing the poop if her city was going to offer a decent standard of living.
Then there's the oxen in Prov. 14:4. No oxen? Everything is nice and clean and no work is getting done. Oxen present? Work is getting done and there's poop to deal with. I think everyone who's ever held a job can vouch that there's junk, in some form to deal with even with the best of jobs.
I wouldn't venture to say that it's a biblical principal that work and accomplishment produces poop, but I think it's safe to say that it's an observable life principal. Even dream jobs have their fair amount of paperwork and/or management issues and/or, well, you get the idea.
The thing about it though, the junk, the poop, the trials, the tribulations, the waste, doesn't have to be wasted. Remember Sherah's cities? Those trenches down the hillsides of Upper and Lower Beth Horon ran into plains. And all that nastiness returned to nature and made the soil healthy and fertile so that it eventually grew crops that fed many people.
I don't like poop/refuse/dung. It's nasty and it stinks, and on a farm with assorted animals I'm always checking my shoes to make sure it don't get tracked inside. But it's a fact of life, and would be even if I didn't live on a farm. Crazy thing is, with time and good decomposition it can be valuable and useful, and people even buy it - in 45 lb bags at Lowes no less! I like to think that God, with time and His direction, will make the heartaches, trials and tribulation by products of my own life useful, valuable and even life giving. And I hope its presence means that good work is being accomplished as well.
