Forgive us our trash baskets

A friend sent this to me today in an email with other cute stories of kids and religion: “One particular four-year-old prayed, “And forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets.”

This one struck me as a wonderful example of how children may interpret something into their own experience and enlighten us poor adults with their truth.

We’ve probably all heard the phrase about our past being baggage that we carry around unnecessarily. I like the imagery of a debt or trespass being trash. One person’s treasure is another’s trash: therefore, something I allow to upset me becomes trash in my basket. Something I dump on another person un-righteously is still my trash and rightfully belongs in my trash basket.

This works ecologically too. I saw a picture today of a landfill where erosion from a massive rainstorm uncovered trash that was probably buried in the 1960 – over 50 years ago. Plastic bags and a tire were still very clearly NOT much degraded by half a century of being underground. Mother Earth, please, please forgive me my trash basket.

And the theme of forgiveness: I think a lot of our unprocessed emotional baggage may be from not having forgiven previous injuries. So if we can do the hard work of forgiveness, we can empty our own trash baskets and quit putting trash in others’ bins. No recycling of old hurts needed or wanted. Just clean up.

Ah, if it were just this easy. Forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets. Out of the mouth of babes…straight into g-d’s ear, please and thank you.