Who is Really Clean?
My husband can’t sit still.
And he’s a sucker for natural beauty.
When we arrived in North India 14 months ago, we landed in a rural community nestled in a river valley. A sweet little stream winds its way toward the river, along the road just a block from our house. It’s lined with trees, and home to 6 or 7 ducks. We walked along the stream each day on our way to and from our language class. It didn’t take long to notice that the stream was sadly cluttered with trash – plastic bags, rags, and wrappers that our neighbors upstream casually tossed into the water on a daily basis. This is traditional village-style waste disposal—you throw it into the stream and it goes away.
My husband, who had a hard time spending his afternoons at a desk doing language study, started heading to the stream to do clean-up. Brad would wade into the water in rubber boots and gloves and toss the trash up onto the bank. Then later after it had dried out, he would return with a sharp stick in one hand and a sack in the other to collect it. He knew, of course, that he was engaged in a somewhat counter-cultural activity that would mark him as even more strange than he already was. The Muslim people we live among have strong ideas about “clean” and “dirty,” and a person who picks up other peoples’ trash would be seen not only as a potential germ-carrier, but as possibly spiritually unclean as well.
Brad learned some ways to talk about what he was doing that seemed to make sense to our neighbors. Now, as passers-by stop to watch him work in the stream, he comments on how beautiful God made this valley and how He wants us to take care of it. Sometimes he explains that honoring what God has made is a way of honoring God Himself. One of his favorite questions is, “Who is really the clean person, the person who throws trash down or the person who picks it up?”
It’s hard to know if his efforts will make a difference long-term. But now there are men in the neighborhood who sometimes join him in cleaning the stream. He spoke to the students at a nearby middle-school about the importance of creation stewardship. He joined forces with the leader of the local mosque to hold a neighborhood meeting about dealing with trash. What means the most to me is the comments I hear from time to time when I visit with women, comments like, “Oh, your husband is the one who cleans the stream. He’s a good man. He will go to Heaven for sure.” They see him as someone who puts time and energy into serving the community without thought for personal gain, other than the reward of a lovely view. That’s something I’ve known about him for 30 years now, and I’m glad that our neighbors can see it.
Posted in Uncategorized and tagged stream cleaning by Lisa