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?

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