Growth Stinks

Growth Stinks

“What is that smell?”  What I could only liken to the reek of rotting fish passed through the kitchen. It made its mark again when I opened the closet and send me rummaging through the canned goods I was prepared to find the worst.
 
Nothing. No bad tins, leaking bottles, molding dry good. I sniffed at the shiny, new cans of wild salmon bought earlier that day – a possible culprit among them? I turned over the solid white albacore, the organic whole tomatoes, and funky Chinese dried foods. Good news, bad news: nothing rotting, no oozing putrid guck. Still the smell.
 
The unconscionable stink came and went throughout the evening, me taking intermittent inhalations into the kitchen trash can, fruitless each time. I considered the neighbors, who at this time of year would be firing up their wood-burning cooker for annual Chinese New Year glutinous rice cakes (gow). I blamed it on the trash that this week now piled up for once-only pickups instead of the former, better twice-weekly sanitation collection. And I thought of the New York nuns who recently filed suit against their upstairs Asian condo neighbors for “vomit-like smells” coming from their flat.
 
Yechhhh! The breeze blew in once more through the kitchen windows and I was overcome with the stench. “It smells like manure!” I commented to my son. That’s when he said, “Oh yeah, Dad put fertilizer on the plants.”
 
Manure
Stinky stuff, excrement, manure is the stuff that helps plants grow, and like it or not it’s what helps people grow too. As Romans 8:28 reminds us, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” ALL things—the waste, the fall-out, the leftovers, the offal and dung. God is the master recycler who sees to it that nothing is for naught and everything can be used to grow His kingdom in our hearts.
 
One of the sayings I’ve adopted the last couple years is: People learn at others’ expense. Their mistakes happen to us, affect us, create havoc for us. Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially life, which means that, yes, bad things happen to good people. Or as the saying goes, sh*t happens.
 
So what? With God’s help and perspective, take the crap and use it for fertilizer. Do the unthinkable—embrace it and say, ”Growth stinks.” Don’t let the others’ waste, waste you. [Point of reference: scene in Slumdog Millionaire.]
 
If we want to become better, wiser, stronger, gentler, more peaceful, better balanced, compassionate, insightful, better humored, loved and loving people—get used to the stinky smells, willingly walk through the manure, and even for a time live in it.
 
That doesn’t mean succumbing to it or becoming like it, but benefiting from it. If we can learn to take the nutrients that get cooked up in the chemical cocktail that is excrement, we will be better for it. We will grow, we will stand taller, firmer, deeper and stretch out our arms to provide shade and counsel to others.
 
Stink takes courage
You gotta hold your nose sometimes. We all find ourselves in situations where conditions are unbearable, where things have gotten so bad that they have begun to rot. However, even in the worst of times, maybe especially at the bottom of the mulching pit, when we turn to God and give it over to Him, he will show us how to use it for good, for growth.
 
The apostle Paul writes about this in 2 Corinthians 2:14-16, saying:
Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life.
 
God’s work, Christ’s central, defining act, was to bring life from death. He overpowers the stink of decay with “knowledge of him” and triumphantly transforms fallen seed into fragrant blossoms that bear fruit.
 
Courage is not just having a stiff upper lip.
Do not be mistakened: Courage is not about strength or will, it is about heart. The root of the word courage comes from the Latin word cor meaning heart. Courage rises from the heart—and for believers from a heart nestled with Jesus who wants us to do the good that gives the heart peace and does not divide it.
 
Courage does mean doing the hard thing, and at times taking the path of most resistance but the one that finally breaks through the barriers that keep us small, root-bound, less than what we are meant to be.
 
What are we smelling?
Is it rotting fish or fertilizer? An augur of death or the prelude to growth? Do we sniff demise? Or like farmers who constantly turn over the earth in the business of growth do we quiver with the pungent possibility of beginning again in fertile soil?

 

Posted via email from 40 Day Fast