Service Entitlement.

To those who find my blog: Thank you for reading my first post on Blogger!

This blurb starts with a pureed meat sauce that a class at school made. Yes, it does sound vaguely revolting! "Pureed meat sauce," you're thinking. "Who would ever THINK of such a thing? Well, I assure you that one of the classes at the high school I work at DID think of it. What astounds me more is the thought process that then went through the mind of one of the young ladies in that class. She thought to herself that it would be funny to dump a bunch of said meat sauce into a planter bed and pretend like she had thrown up in it. Needless to say, the thought did not enter her mind to clean it up. Either that or her laziness and sense of entitlement got in the way. Probably a bit of both.

About a week later one of the students comes up to me and begs me to clean the meat sauce up. Apparently it had started to smell very bad and because I am one of the custodians it was my responsibility to fix her sense of smell in that small corner of her world. I told her that I would not clean it up until she told me who had dumped it there. Her response (as it is with the majority of high school students) was basically that she would not rat the person out. I told her that basically the mess was not going to get cleaned up. She caved, or broke like a dam, depending on your preference of descriptive phrases.

Armed with a name I promptly forgot about the mess and seeing that this was Friday afternoon there were going to be a couple days over the weekend for everything to "ripen" even more, as it were. Finally, Monday rolled around and I rolled by the detritus in my golf cart and caught a whiff. I decided to clean it up because I didn't want to wait to find the girl who had done it with the smell being as bad as it was. She would pay later.

One of the teachers came up to me and watched as I gingerly scooped the trash into a bag. He kindly offered to me the name of the girl who did it, at which point I turned to him and asked why he or none of the other teachers asked her to clean it up. He was silent.

When the school day ended the next day, the culprit was lounging around with a few friends and I went up to her and told her to pick up trash around the place for the mess that she had left for me to clean up. Her response was basically to tell me that it was my job and if I didn't want to do it then I shouldn't have chosen the profession I went into. Trying to put a polite and slightly humorous spin on her comment I said to her that, "I didn't choose it. It was chosen for me since before time began." I then stated that, "Sometimes a man needs to take a job to get by in life." She gave me an odd look of incomprehension and began to whine her way through trash pick up.

Returning to my thought on laziness and/or entitlement I believe that she felt entitled to the right to make a mess and not clean it up. This thought reminded me of a story that my mom told me about her dad when he was a janitor at the Air Force Academy supporting his family. My details are probably a bit wrong but I believe a cadet threw some trash on the ground and my grandpa saw the act and told him to pick it up. The cadet's response was, "If I didn't litter then you would be out of a job." Human nature doesn't change and, in a sense, I'm happy with the way I can now relate with my grandpa. I have found that wisdom has a way of growing with age if you cultivate it through action by means of meditation on the Truth.

I want to approach the girl and pose to her a question. I want to ask her if she has ever made a mess at home and had her mom tell her to clean up after herself. Of course, the question would be rhetorical seeing as no mother besides Mary mother of Jesus would ever lack that opportunity! Those are words passed from mother to daughter within every generation for the purpose of aggravating children. Do you suppose her response to her mother would be something like, "No! You clean it up mom! If you don't want to clean up after your children then why did you choose the profession of motherhood?"

I have prayed that God would give me a love for this girl regardless of her gross attitude. After all, my response to Christ when I sin is to say to Him, "You made this mess, now you clean it up!" How wrong my thinking is when I say that. I forget that I have perverted myself and chosen to walk down the streets of sin. Thankfully, God paces the highway of holiness.

When God made me, He looked upon me in my mother's womb and said, "This child is VERY good. He is the apple of my eye and the object of my affection." God has already cleansed me and the demands I place on Him effectively state that I have no responsibility for myself and no desire for His love. I try to prove that I am unworthy of love, but praise God that He loves apart from any worthiness of the recipient of His love. Worthiness comes through service and God shows that we can love others by being responsible for ourselves and serving them, for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.