That is a lot of garbage

What the biggest man-made structure?

You might be thinking Great Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the proposed Mubarak al-Kabir Tower, in Kuwait. However, those are all wrong…. maybe.

It’s hard to answer that question. What do we mean by biggest? Tallest? Widest? Takes up the most area? Even the term man-made structure can be problematic. What if we really weren’t planning on making it, yet we did anyhow does that count?

If that is the case, then the answer might just be Fresh Kills, a garbage dump on Staten Island, New York. Opened in 1948, the Fresh Kills landfill site (named after the Dutch word kil, meaning “small river”) soon became one of the largest structure in human history, trumping (at least by volume) the Great Wall of China. The site is 4.6 square miles in area and, when operational, twenty barges, each carrying 650 tons of rubbish, were shipped in every day. At its peak, the dump was already more than 80 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty.

It doesn’t ever seem to get into the record books, however. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to acknowledge the biggest thing we humans have done is a lot of garbage.

Paul did, however, understand this reality;

I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,

Philippians 3:8

We like to brag about our accomplishments and importance but in reality, all we have here is destined for the scrapheap. The greatest thing we get here is isn’t what we have here; it is what we get when we leave here. Our faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior is the only thing that will matter to us in eternity. Everything else while seemingly impressive, won’t amount to much more than a big pile of trash

Where is our treasure? What have we valued as a treasure that really isn’t? Do we know Jesus Christ? Are we putting Him at the top?

It the biggest thing in our lives the Lord or a landfill?

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog