Lessons From My Dad

I will give thanks unto thee 

for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are thy works and 

that my soul knoweth rightfully well.

Some people get what they need from the supermarkets and malls and some people are forced to get it from the garbage dumps. When I was a kid in Hawaii, the dumps (just like this picture) was a viable option. Think I'm going to borrow this picture from a friend. If nothing else to remember from whence I came.
(cont. below)

A child scraping out a living in the dumps - probably in Mexico

When I was very young, about the age of that young child in the picture above, my dad used to take me to the dumps where in addition to his regular job, he would collect scrap metal along with a host of other things. To be honest, I hated going there. It was humiliating and a nasty environment that if I described it in detail I could with utter certainty guarantee that you would lose your breakfast. I don't have to imagine much what that child's life is like.

My dad was the son of a sugar plantation worker who himself was the son of a sugar plantation worker. My dad probably hated that plantation culture as much as I hated being in those dumps. When he was in about the 8th grade (possibly earlier) he was pulled out of school to work in the plantation store to help support my grandfather's very large family. That was plantation life. It wasn't always very fair.

He managed to escape that life when he signed up for the army during WWII in the pacific for about 5 years. When he came back, his eyes were open to many new things and many new people. He got a job as a welding equipment repairman and later in sales. He also married my mom, a nurse from Nebraska who worked at the plantation dispensary - something that was not exactly looked upon with favor by some people. My mom could have had a place with the elite, the managers and doctors hired from the mainland US but she chose to marry a "local" instead, come what may. He could have ended up cutting cane and she could have ended up at the "Yacht Club" with the rest of the "haole" manager class from the mainland.

My dad wanted better for us kids and his job couldn't pay for that so he would spend every day after work and saturdays at the dumps gleaning for scrap metals. He got pretty good at it. Later in life the dumps people used to call him "the King of the Dumps." Out of that extra they managed to send us kids to private school. They wanted better for us. It costs money to send your kids there. Up until the 8th grade, I went to school with the children of parents who were much better off financially. When I was about the age of this little girl in the picture, my dad started taking me to the dumps with him on Saturdays and in the summer, sometimes on weekday afternoons.

I utterly resented it because I lived in the utter fear of the humiliation I would suffer if one of my friends from private school were to ever come down to dump their rubbish and see me there in the midst of it all. (Again I will spare you a graphic description.) There was a tremendous stigma attached to being among the dumps people - the extremely poor. I had no idea as a child that those dumps were paying for my education and exposure to the very friends I had come to know in my life. I honestly didn't realize that until I was a young man in my mid 20's. I was somewhat spared humiliation when for some reason when I had finished 7th grade my parents took us out of private school and put us into the public school closer to where we lived.

We humans can be very adaptable to circumstances given the time and consistency. My dad took me to the dumps until I was about 16. I did manage after a while to find some solace in it all. It's amazing what people throw away. As long as I was gleaning for scrap metal I was also free to pick up anything else I wanted. By the time I was barely a teenager I had amassed quite a collection of bicycle parts and had my own little bicycle shop in a little corner of my dad's garage/warehouse. I was pretty good at piecing parts together to make complete bicycles. I easily had over a dozen of them at one point in time. So, I started learning something my dad had been trying to teach me all that time. Oh the stench was still there. The humiliation was still there but I found out what most dumps gleaners find out at least at some point in their lives and learn to appreciate. "One man's junk is another man's treasure."

When I was about sixteen I was old enough to go out and get jobs to make any money I needed doing odd jobs and yard work. I never really went back to the dumps after that except to dump the rubbish. Honestly, I would have been happy to never have seen those dumps again. My dad continued to go there for most of the rest of his life. He loved finding those treasures that other people had discarded, taking them home and cleaning them up and placing them on the shelves in their living room. In my later years as an adult I had the pleasure of knowing him and I realized that he could look past the grim and filth covering something he had found and he could see past all that to see the treasure that was underneath. When anyone would visit, he would watch their eyes and if he saw them paying a particularly appreciative attention to one of his treasures, he would reach up on the shelf when they were leaving and say, "I want you to have this."

I would love to say that I saw all this right away but I still had a certain distaste for the dumps and almost an embarrassment of my dad. It wasn't until after my mid twenties that I was utterly delivered from that resentment and shame. When I became a Christian, after a few years I had gotten to know quite a few people who were well endowed with the gift of the Spirit. Among them I noticed with a certain internal respect was a pastoral couple (Mr. and Mrs. Day) of a small gathering that most people seemed to have nothing to do with. I seemed to always take note of them as being a little different.

To make the point, one night a friend of mine was working as a security guard in the Psyche ward. He had a particular anointing to walk into that ward and bring a certain calm to all the patients, so much so that the nurses hoped he would be on the same duty roster. A young man had been brought in a few days before and they misdiagnosed him and mismedicated him so he fell into a coma. Apparently there wasn't much they could do so they were just waiting for him to die. Suddenly, that night, the double doors to the ward burst open and Mrs. Day, like a battle axe, burst into the ward, motioned to my friend and immediately proceeded into the young man's room to pray for him along with my friend. That young man suddenly sat up in bed alive and well. To say that I was impressed would be an understatement.

One day, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, "Go to the dumps." To be honest, as I said before, I wanted nothing to do with the dumps for quite a few years but because it was so clear, I reluctantly got in my car and went there. When I got there, I parked the car wondering why I was sent there because I had no urge to get out of the car. As I looked around, out there quite a ways was an older couple standing facing each other and holding hands and praying before they began to glean the fields. It was Mr. and Mrs. Day! There was a certain aura around them as they prayed. They were there to pick through used clothes to take home, clean and likely give them away the same way my dad used to do all those years.

I never looked at the dumps or my dad the same way again.

So in closing I would have to say something having lived some years on this earth. That there are some things that God wants to speak to us about. He wants to speak to us about the dumps and discarded treasures hidden in human filth. The same human treasures that He sent His Son Jesus to die for. He wants to gift us to see past all the human filth and recognize the treasure being concealed by it. To take them home, clean them up and treasure them.

He also wants us to see that underneath all the imperfections of our life long before we actually are aware of Him that He has hidden His treasures all along the way in our lives. Before we were ever born, He knew us in our mother's womb.

Above it all perhaps even warning us that we need to be more careful who and what we discard and toss in the trash heap. After all, somebody may just come along and see the treasure that we rejected. Just how will we feel then? God's greatest treasure, Jesus the Messiah, was also rejected of men.

If we feel like Jesus is strangely missing from our lives or our fellowship, it may very well be that He has gone dumpster diving for the lost and discarded treasures of humanity. If you really want to find Him, you may very well have to go to the dumps as well...