Kingdom of Cardboard & Spoils

What does discipleship look like?  What does it look like after a stroke?  Watch and see!

If I’m the king of all I survey, then I am the king of cardboard and spoils.

My kingdom is a noisy, windowless room in the back of a Trader Joe’s grocery store. Here are the haphazard stacks of empty cardboard boxes. Here is the giant box baler. Here are the shopping carts marked “Spoils,” their wire frames brimming with still-good fruit, meat and flowers.

In Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy, he defines kingdom as “a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens.”

My kingdom used to be a stage. A microphone. A piano, and an audience of thousands. My kingdom was a performance. A show. A sham.

Then came the stroke.

Now, five days a week, I arrive at Trader Joe’s in the early dark, hours before the sun cracks the horizon.

I push my mop up and down aisles, sweep my broom into corners to collect the debris from the day before. The store is quiet, empty. There is one audience in this kingdom.

But that’s ok, because I’m not performing. There is no Stage Dieter here. No superman seeking to wow the masses with feats of spiritual strength.

I’m just me. Just Dieter. The guy who mops the floor, who bales the empty cardboard boxes for recycling, who delivers the spoils to the Salvation Army.

There’s something beautiful about this simple, menial work, though.

Take the food marked as “spoils,” for example. It’s all still good. The fruit is good, the meat is good, the flowers are good. But they’re not perfect. Anything that has an expiration date of today cannot be put out in the store for sale. And if a pear so much as rolls off the smooth green pyramid of fellow pears, it gets put in the spoils pile. It’s not perfect anymore.

So the Trader Joe’s employees fill shiny carts with all the perfectly edible imperfection and wheel the load back to my kingdom. My last task of the day is to load the van with spoils and deliver it to the local Salvation Army, where it will feed the hungry, who won’t care at all that their apple is lopsided, that their hamburger is in the waning stage of freshness. They don’t care how it looks. They just want to eat.

To me, this, here in the back room, this is what is real. Not the bright aisles of suburban shoppers making their menu selections from stacks of perfection.

I understand the spoils. I can relate. Because I, too, am spoils. Over, and over, and over again.

I used to be packaged as perfect. Back in the heyday of my church career, I was a shiny, unblemished apple. At least that’s the image I polished up and displayed to the pubic.

But now, stripped of my talent, my stage and my six-figure salary, I relish the imperfection. I revel in the spoils.

As I break down these empty squares of cardboard, abandoned boxes that once held and protected good more valuable than themselves, I survey my kingdom and I am pleased.

I feed cardboard piles into the giant maw of the baler and chuckle to myself as I think, “I am recycled Dieter.”

I am emptied and crumpled and stained and ready to be used again in a new way, in a new life.

Work was hard today. I am tired. The knuckles of my twisted right hand are scraped raw—the hand is numb now, so I don’t feel it when I bash it against something harder than skin.

But you know what? It’s ok. I come home after work and I think, “It’s good today.”

It’s not a sermon. It’s not a performance. It’s not perfection.

But the cardboard is recycled. The spoils are feeding the hungry. And today I am thinking life is good. It’s very good.

(This poem about Dieter Zander’s story, A Kingdom of Cardboard and Spoils, was written by LaDonna Witmer on 3-18-2011.)

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