This last week I spent some time on our adopted piece of the Mission Creek Greenway (between Ziprick & Gerstmar). The city supplied “kits” to help with the task. Amongst the items in the kit were aluminum grabbers. They have a handle on one end, with a trigger and on the other end of a 2 foot extension are two small spring loaded suction cup devices mounted on finger like appendages. You pull the trigger, the little suction cups pull together to grasp stuff. In this case its garbage I was grasping. I have seen similar devices in the hospital to use when you have limited mobility and you want to pinch the annoying visitor in your room (that may be my interpretation), As you may have already figured out, I am quite fascinated with this instrument, a small miracle from the engineering world. They were so handy as I trudged through the park, on the path, and off the path. I picked up anything from cigarette butts (shouldn’t they be biodegradable? Obviously, we must do more than provide a garbage can within 1 metre of the location I nabbed many of them. By the way, I think I could fill a bag of them in one trip up Clifton road – my bike ride up that hill is slow enough for me to see each and everyone of the hundreds of cigarette butts along the roadside). …back to the grabber…I found it very convenient to pick up everything from plastic, to beer cans, to a diaper along the Greenway. “A diaper!” you say? Well, could you blame any parent who may have been carrying a baby in one of those snugglies and the child has a serious diaper incident – I do have some empathy for the parent, it could happen… overall the section we cleaned was already pretty clean, I expected worse, I think most people want our city to be a beautiful place, and take care of the natural environment we enjoy, and dare I say, take for granted occasionally. Back to the grabber – I had this thought and questions followed. Sometimes we reach for things in life, and reach out to others with “grabbers”. We want to see our lives free of the garbage, we want to help others deal with their garbage. So we employ grabbers that help us do that, but also keep distance. Sometimes the distance is for safety and sanitary reasons, good reasons like healthy boundaries. Do we employ these methods at times to keep relational distance? Do we use grabbers so we don’t have to get our hands dirty? So we don’t have to really interact with our own garbage? Do you and I get too concerned about self-protection and image, and then miss the messy work of becoming more like Jesus?  

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