Picking Up Cans

I am a chronic “doer.” If there were a group called Grace-earners Anonymous, I would need to be there every week.

“Hi, my name is Marshall, and I am a Grace-earner.”

“Hi, Marshall,” the room would say, and we would begin to talk about the poison of busyness and trying to avoid God by doing things for him.

But no group like that exists that I know of, and instead Christians who are chronic do-ers are often encouraged to fan that flame of busyness into a roaring fire, looking to all the world like we have intimacy with God. But in reality, intimacy with God is the thing that we both want the most and fear the most.

I’ve been on a journey of learning to enjoy God and believing that he enjoys me, and I have been to a number of conferences on the subject and read lots of excellent books about grace and the heart of the Father. But one of the best lessons I have learned came from aluminum cans littering my neighborhood. I never thought that aluminum cans could teach me about my need for God, and how I substitute busyness for intimacy with him, but if the Lord can speak through a donkey (see Numbers 22), he certainly can use my littered streets.

I live in a somewhat rundown part of town, and one week I got the bright idea of picking up the aluminum cans on the street and in the park. I figured that if I could pick up enough cans, then over the course of a few months I could make some spare change while I walked my dog each morning. I’d just take the cans to the recycling center, and voila!—money in my pocket. And so I carried an extra grocery bag or two with me and started hunting cans on my early morning walks with Joe, my boxer. I got really good at it: I could spot a can from a half-block away. I was able to find cans tucked in bushes and hidden in tall grass and weeds. I would even look in trash cans in the park for cans (but I did not dig through the garbage, I only looked for ones on the top). I don’t mean to brag, but I was finding a good five to seven cans each day. And some of those cans weren’t the regular 12-ounce ones either—some were the big 20-ounce beer cans, which were almost like finding two cans at once.

As I collected the cans, I loved the feeling of productivity and I loved calculating in my mind all the money I would be making on these walks. But I also had this nagging feeling of guilt. There were poor and homeless men who walked my neighborhood, too, and they would collect cans in large trash bags. I am neither poor nor homeless, and I felt as though I were robbing them by picking up this trash. So my morning walks were this mix of guilt and “fun” as I found cans, my mind and heart and soul busy with my “side work.”

One morning I’d had a particularly prolific time in the neighborhood, finding close to 20 cans, half of which were the 20-ouncers. And yet guilt was right there because I had expanded my route that morning, going onto some new streets, and I wondered if I was infringing on one of the other collectors out there. As I neared my house, I came to a convenience store that sells mostly beer. Out comes a man with a can of beer tucked into his coat pocket (at 7:00 a.m.) and, noticing me, he makes conversation by saying, “See you been gettin’ them cans this morning.”

“Yeah, sure have,” I replied.

“I’ve gotta do that myself,” he said.

Overwhelmed by the guilt of having 20 cans, cans that this man could very well need to get out of poverty (note the sarcasm), I quickly said, “Do you want these?”

“Sure,” he said, taking the cans and walking off.

As I continued home, guilt took a new form. I felt bad for giving the cans out of a guilty, non-loving heart. And I felt stupid for giving away my hard morning’s work—I could have gotten at least 75 cents for those cans!

So I was telling this story to my spiritual director as an example of how I feel guilty 95 percent of the time in my life. When I finished, I expected my friend to begin addressing the unnecessary guilt and shame that I felt over picking up cans, cans that were perfectly available to anyone who comes along to get them.

But instead he looked at me and he said, “Marshall, the question that comes to my mind is, why are you picking up cans?”

At first I thought he meant that I was too good to pick up cans, and that I really wasn’t going to make any money at it anyway. But he went on.

“You have been given 30 to 45 minutes each morning by yourself, walking your dog, and you could spend that time walking with God and enjoying his presence. And yet you choose to spend that time looking for cans. It’s not because you need money, because those aren’t going to make you money anyway. And so the question is, why are you picking up cans? What makes you busy yourself with every part of your day, so that God has no room to just be with you and speak with you, and you with him?”

All I could do was laugh and know that my true heart and motives had been revealed in a way that I had not expected. The next day I quit picking up cans on my walks, and started asking God to help me enjoy him, to help me enjoy his presence and his creation. But I quickly found that picking up cans was not merely a physical manifestation of my running from God. It was also a metaphor for the myriad ways that I busy myself and keep from enjoying the Lord’s presence. Even as I walked, my heart and mind and soul were still busy. I began to worry about money and scheme about how to pay for a fence for our backyard. I began to worry about the neighborhood and how little I was doing to transform it. I began to think about the I-V chapter at UNC-Greensboro and things that needed to happen there. I was picking up cans.

Most of the students I come in contact with, especially student leaders, are picking up cans right and left. They’re so busy leading Bible studies and organizing outreaches and discipling peers and attending prayer groups that they neglect the care of their own souls. As their staff worker, it is easy to encourage them in their busyness and productivity, and to neglect calling them to care for their own souls and to take Sabbath rest.

So how do we stop occupying ourselves with meaningless activity and take time for our souls to grow? Here are some thoughts:

1. Stop believing the lie that “doing nothing” but listening for God and enjoying him really is doing nothing. When we are quiet and still, we are doing the important work of soul cultivation and restoration. In Isaiah 30:15, the Lord says, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.”

2. Allow quiet to invade our noise. TV, radio, iPods, X-boxes, instant messenger alerts, cell phones—there is a constant stream of noise bombarding us and tiring our souls. And it is hard to choose silence. It feels so unproductive and lonely. And yet it creates space for God to be the voice we hear most clearly.

3. Ask ourselves if we really believe that we are loved by the Lord for who we are rather than for what we do for him. Allow time for the question to roll around and settle in our deepest places, and if we find that we are still picking up cans in order to find favor with him, ask for his help to stop and just enjoy being with him.

4. Try to spend ten minutes in quiet with God each day for a week, just being still and believing that in that stillness and nothingness, we are loved.

As we begin to lean into the love of God, to test and see if it is really there to hold us, we are freed from picking up cans. And as we’re free to enjoy him and to find what true rest really is, we can give ourselves more fully to the work that is set before us.

All that from some simple cans. How great is our God!

—Marshall Benbow is the director of G.U.P.Y (the Greensboro Urban Project, Y’all) in Greensboro, NC. He has served on InterVarsity staff for eight years, and is the husband of Diane and the father of Eliza and Psalter. He loves disc golf, the UNC Tar Heels, and anything written by Eugene Peterson.