What I learned picking up trash on Maple Ave for three years.

The first Saturday I went out with a black trash bag and a pair of cheap gloves, I had no idea what I was doing. I had told the church about it the previous Sunday — a vague announcement at the end of the service, mostly to commit myself to it out loud so I’d actually show up. Three people came. We picked up trash on the block for forty-five minutes and then went to get coffee. That was it.

That was three years ago. Last Saturday, sixteen of us were out there. Something has happened in those three years that I am still trying to understand, and I want to write it down before I forget.

01The first Saturday

Here is what I thought I was doing: a small, manageable act of service that would feel good and make our church look slightly less weird to the neighborhood. I was, in a word, strategizing. What I didn’t realize was how exposed I would feel. Cars slow down. People look at you. It was the most spiritual thing I had done all week.

02What I expected to learn

I expected the obvious lessons. Humility, solidarity, witness. None of those things turned out to be wrong, exactly. They just turned out to be smaller than I thought.

I had been showing up looking for the lesson, the conversion story, the strategic outcome. What was being offered was a relationship — slow, weird, and almost impossible to write down.

— year two, in a notebook somewhere

03What I actually learned

Somewhere in year two I started noticing that I knew the names of three different people who lived on the corner. None of this was strategy. None of it was the result of doing anything except showing up to the same block, with the same bag, at the same time, every week, for two years.

04Why I’m still going

The block is not a project. The block is a place. The people are not a target. They are people. Picking up trash is a small physical declaration, repeated weekly, that this place is ours and we are not leaving.

So we’ll see you Saturday at 8. Bring a bag. Coffee’s on me.