Whoever said one person can’t make an impact for the good on the world never heard of Grace McWilliams and her three friends.
Determined to clean up her town McWilliams rounded up a team of friends and started a free recycling pick up service for homes and businesses around town. The program took off.
Here is McWilliams on Blessed Earth:
“We rode around in the 100 degree days in a truck lacking air conditioning and sorted people’s recycling. Our struggles led to small yet nonetheless meaningful triumphs. We sorted through a local restaurant’s glass to separate the colors, strengthening our immune systems and muscles along the way. We picked up three times weekly and were always met with at least 500 lbs of glass. …
After running our service for less than a year, we recycled 2 tons of paper, 6 tons of glass, 300 lbs of plastic, 500 lbs aluminum, 3.3 tons of metal and 1,216 lbs of electronics, saving a total of 43.6 cubic yards of landfill space. A small number of people can make a HUGE difference.” Read the whole story.
Did they save the world? No. Of course not.
Does it matter? No. The scale of our work is not the standard by which we are measured, nor even by its success, but by its faithfulness. And McWilliams and her friends were certainly that.
In his essay, “No Little People, No Little Places” Francis Schaeffer writes that as people trying to serve God we ought to seek the lowest place until we are extruded into a larger work. He uses the work extruded intentionally, as it pictures a metal forced under intense pressure into the shape of a die. Schaeffer reminds us that God can make even the smallest things vessels of his great power: a few loaves and pieces of fish, a band of country fishermen, four friends trying to bless their community by picking up its trash.
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