I have a friend named Corey who lived in Quito, Ecuador, for 14 years. His parents where missionaries to Ecuador, and he was very young when they started ministering to people in the Quito landfill. Yeah . . . a dump.
More than 300 people live in the dump near my friend’s former home. They live off the trash that flows into the dump from the surrounding area. They survive on the byproducts of society, and Corey and his family lived among them, showing them the love of Jesus with the simple things.
There is a lot more to Corey's story, but to make it shorter—this guy knows trash. He's seen lots of it. So when we are eating lunch together and he busts out with something like, “Americans have the greatest trash!” I'm inclined to believe him. I hadn't really noticed this until Corey pointed it out, but we as Americans waste so many things that could be used over and over again.
There is a thriving community in our suburb that has a lot of new businesses going in. And in this community there is an entire neighborhood of houses that a developer has bought from the homeowners and is going to demolish in the name of progress. There are more than 20 homes in this neighborhood, all in great condition; imagine the good you could do with 20 houses worth of building material. For those of you who know me or have read my stuff before, you know how I love a good cause. All of the materials from those houses could have gone to Habitat for Humanity or some other building project.
We waste so many things that would be considered treasure to people in other parts of the world. Not only is all of this wastefulness bad for the environment, it is bad stewardship of the things God has given us.
Back to garbage. You can tell a lot about society by looking at its trash. There are professionals called garbologists. As the name suggests, the people who hold these jobs dig through and analyze our garbage. But they don't do this just for fun. Many garbologists believe that you can tell more about a society through its trash than through many other scientific means. In fact, they have estimated the number of family members in a household and the average annual income of certain areas just by looking at its trash. This really struck a chord with me when I learned about the kind of trash that was scattered out on the road in front of my church.
A friend of mine named Kenny, who is a youth missions pastor at my church, gathered a group of students from my youth group to clean up the road as an act of community service. The stuff they found was heartbreaking. This road not only runs by our church, but by a local high school, too. To see what kinds of things our suburb threw away was mind-blowing.
When the cleanup team went out, they loaded black garbage bags that overfilled a pickup truck. They found bags of weed, used pregnancy tests, beer bottles and condoms. This is not in the inner-city of Atlanta; this is in my happy little suburb in front of my church, right next to the high school that some of my friends go to.
After they cleaned up the road, Kenny thought it must have been quite a while since anyone had picked up the street. So he decided they should go back in a couple weeks and see if things were any better. They weren’t. The students found just as much trash—and the same kind.
You wouldn't really think it by looking from the outside, but on the inside my community, my generation, is aching. Our trash proves it. My youth group now knows more about our community and the needs we can meet. 
