The Dump
Story★★★★Senior Pastor Joel Eidsness of Walnut Hill Community Church in Bethel, Connecticut, once took bis seven-year-old daughter on an unusual date. They visited the town dump. Backing his Oldsmobile up against the mound of refuse, he placed his daughter on the roof, and, with pencil and paper, they began listing all the items they could identify. There was a plastic swimm ing pool, a barbecue, and several old lawn chairs.
There were Barbie dolls, bicycle frames, skateboards, play refrigerators and stoves, radios, televisions-everything that a young girl dreams of and more. Returning home, they pulled alongside a double trailer truck, piled high with hunks of scrap-cars that had been crushed. He leaned over to his daughter and reminded her that the beautiful car they were riding in would someday end up in a scrap heap like that. 1 Pat Thomas, David Marks (Antioch, Tenn: The Home Missions Department of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, 1994), 3.
1 Erwin W. Lutzer, Failure: The Back Door to Success (Chicago: Moody Press, 1975), 53. -
The point
A pastor took his daughter to the dump to identify discarded items, then showed her crushed cars to remind her that even beautiful things end up in scrap heaps. Eternity matters.