Our new town has a recycling program. In theory it's great because it eliminates garbage from the waste stream. In practice, it stinks. Is it because I found myself washing out an old peanut butter jar so it can be recycled that I don't like it? Yes Maybe. But for a guy who's only recycling practice was saving cans in Boy Scouts to raise money for camp (or the one time I made enough to buy not one but two books on the War of Northern Aggression), and my (now ended) practice of dumping at least 1 quart of oil straight into the ground each Earth Day, I've never really been a fan. I took Calculus IV four times. It's a long story (aren't they all with me?). The first time I was fascinated by the subject. The main premise of Calculus I is that on a small enough scale, a curved line is flat. In Cal IV it is that locally a sphere is a plane. Not a dimensional shift, but a dimensional addition that makes it fascinating to watch. The point of Calculus IV is not to watch it being done, or to see it as a stepping stone to Differential Equations, both of which are prerequisites to an engineering degree. It is neat to watch, and it is a stepping stone to DE and a Degree, but that is not the point.

In my last church I had a hard time finding a Sunday School class to fit into. The one I kept trying, and kept getting thrust back into when the class I really fit into disbanded, recycled its lessons. Month in and month out the bottom line was that things would work great if we just acted the way we were supposed to. Well, crap or get off the pot. For over 30 years I prayed that God would hurry up and give me patience. I stopped at 3 decades because He did. He gave me patience because I got tired of recycling the feel good lessons and put them to use.

Some things just aren't meant to be recycled. For everything else, clean out the peanut butter jars.

~~~~~~~~~~~