By Dr. John E. Morgan

Pastor - Collinsville Baptist Church

It all happened because my parents and grandparents had a problem. They were hooked on home grown tomatoes.

Both houses always had huge tomato patches. Tomatoes to eat now. Tomatoes to can. And to make into other things.

Daddy planted tomato seeds from the previous year’s best tomatoes in milk cartons. They would grow on a window sill in the basement. Once planted, the tomatoes were weeded, watered and watched.

My parents had a new house with more land. They could have a bigger garden with more tomatoes.

Which brings me to a late spring day at my grandparents’ house. I was nineteen and had just finished my first year of college. I was an engineering student and had successfully taken calculus and chemistry. I was dating the prettiest girl in Nashville, my future wife Gloria. I thought I was something. Life was good.

My parents and grandparents were talking and I was ignoring. Mother said, “Butch, come here.” Uh oh.  “You need to go down to the old barn and get us some manure.” And the old barn had a lot of cow manure.

My grandmother said, “you’ll need to get the wheel barrow full a time or two for us and then fill up all the buckets for your mother to take home.” I truly thought that they were kidding. They could not expect me, now a college sophomore, to go dig manure. I had never had to do this before. Just because they now lived further in the country, why should I suffer. Dig manure? Me? That was obviously beneath me. Turns out they were serious.

Down the hill I went with the wheel barrow in the late Spring heat. To the barn. Muttering all the way. Becoming louder as I got further from the house.

“I cannot believe they want me to dig manure. Don’t they know who I am? I passed calculus. Lot of other students didn’t. I can do differential equations and they want me to dig manure. Unbelievable.”

The old barn had no lights. Just stalls. No animals right then. But lots of what is left behind when the animals leave. Some old and dry.  Some not. Instructions – get it all.

I began digging in the manure. Still angry that they would expect me to lower myself to doing this. The dust began to fill the air growing thick in the beams of sunlight coming into the barn through the cracks. The smell – well, you know the smell. Flies began to be attracted to the freshly dug manure. And pausing to land on my sweat covered back. And around my sweat covered face.

Dig, dig. Mumble, mumble. An hour passed. I began to tire. I began to think. And lose my anger. Who did they think I was to dig manure? No, who did I think I was? I no longer felt so good about myself.

I could feel the pride rolling down my face with the sweat. My mother and grandmother were my heroes. They had sacrificed for me for nineteen years. They had taught me what it means to be a Christian. And showed me what a Christian life looked like. I was ashamed of myself.

By the time I finished the last of the digging and shut the door, I realized that the treasure in the barn was humility. I had a better picture of who I really was and of who I needed to be.

Paul tells us to “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit.  Instead we must count others more significant than ourselves”.  How do we do that?  Paul says with humility.  Later in the passage he reminds us that Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death on a cross.”

It works like this – you think you are too good to dig manure.  Would you rather be hanging on a cross?  Or do you really think that you are better than Jesus?

I wish I could tell you that I learned my lesson for good that day in the barn.  But sometimes I forget.  My pride grows.  And I have to remind myself of Jesus.  And a day when he used a barn full of manure to grow me into a better person.

The tomatoes were really good that year, too.  Not that I take pride in that.