“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21

A Lesson from the Crusher

Walk His Way Revisited
First Published in July, 2014

Recently I’ve been working with my husband at our construction yard turning concrete and asphalt into a reusable product. My job is to stand on a small tin-covered platform and remove trash and unwanted items from the rubble as it goes by on a conveyor belt. It’s a dirty, nasty job but someone has to do it so it might as well be me. God and I speak together while I work so thought I’d share one of the lessons I’ve learned from the crusher.

As you might imagine there are all kinds of trash items in the loads of concrete that come into the yard. I’ve picked out bottles, petro-mat, wood, old gloves, shoes, tennis and golf balls, and even a plastic toy horse, just to name a few things. There is also “treasure” hidden amongst the rubble—copper and brass wire, pipe and fittings. Now that may not sound like “treasure” but they have a value 400 times the amount of the finished product that we make.*

Picking the trash out has to happen quickly and I only get a brief moment to decipher what is trash and what is treasure and throw it into the correct bin before it is whisked away back into the crusher to be processed some more. Sometimes the missed debris returns for a second chance at being found and sometimes it never comes back my way. It then either gets lost in the bowels of the machinery or out in a finished product.

God revealed to me that events in my life are like this debris going across the belt. Sometimes life rolls by smoothly with no “trash” to be seen and sometimes there is so much “trash” in a brief moment that I can’t possibly get it all out. If I focus too much on the “trash,” deciding what to do with it, I can miss the “treasure” as it goes by. Now sometimes that “treasure” might return and I can have another chance to get it, but a lot of the time it never does. The “trash” has a way of returning again and again until I can deal with it all, but the “treasure” could be lost.

The real “treasure” in life is relationships—relationship with people and with the Heavenly Father—and if I don’t give them the attention they need and deserve, I may lose something of great worth. Yes, life is full of “trash” that needs attention, too. If I don’t deal with the “trash,” the “finished product” won’t be very good, but the “treasure” has a value beyond calculation and is worth fighting for to get every last piece.

Father, please help us give the needed and deserved attention to our relationship with You and others. Help us to decipher the difference between “trash” and “treasure” in our lives and gather every last piece to Your glory. Amen.

*Road base $10.00/ton; Copper $4,000.00/ton