Lent day 12: manure

⁶Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. ⁷So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ ⁸He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. ⁹If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’
It was one of those youth group trips that you still wonder about years later. Most of the stories are about the freezing night following a day of not eating and hard farm work.  How miserable we were.  We were to experience a day in the life of the majority world to better understand why the gift of a heifer so significantly changes lives.
But our first world stomachs were screaming in hunger and the weather was cold and rainy.
The really miserable girls -- the ones who snuck to the cars to get their cell phones and texted their mothers about how I was torturing them -- now needed to go to the bathrooms. They had already reported back to their parents and anyone else they could text that they would have nothing to do with this youth group once they got out of this place. So it was a quiet walk.

In the pitch black we cut across the field only to find ourselves in a pond of sticky mud.  One by one we tripped and fell in the horrible smelling mud.  Then one screamed realizing we had walked into the African pig's pen.  We were sitting in a puddle of manure.
So, when Jesus was asked what the sign would be of God breaking into the world and God's kingdom taking over, Jesus told the story of the orchard owner and the fig tree.  And the gardener that steps in and saves the unfruitful tree with a shovel full of manure. And there it is.  God breaking in and saving us from our own unfruitfulness.  That's the sign and it happens over and over again each day.

And then someone laughed.  I think I was the first one to cry.  But not the only one.  Crying and laughing we wiped ourselves off and then against retreat rules, I started a fire and we warmed up.  H. said it was the worst day of her life.  M. said no, it was when her grandmother died.  And she talked about that day.  And how she walked into the church and we were all there and she felt hugged just seeing us.  S. said starving and freezing with us was better than most days.  And we heard why and we cried with her and prayed. And they promised each other they would do another retreat to see what horrors I could conjure up for them.  And they came back.  Manure.