Last Tuesday, I put out my garbage as always. Later on in the day, I heard the garbage truck come by, but I was busy at the time. It was almost an hour later before I was free to retrieve my garbage bin and bring it back inside my garage. However, when I looked out the window, I saw no garbage bin. At least, there was no garbage bin anywhere near where I had placed mine. But it was windy and I saw a bin sitting out in the middle of the street near my neighbour's driveway. When my sons came home, I told them to bring in the garbage bin from the middle of the street. They told me that they thought it was the neighbours. I told them the bin was mine, and to go bring it in. So they did.
The evening before last, the man next door came knocking on my door and asked me if I had seen his garbage bin. I explained to him what happened and said honestly, "I have no idea. I might have it. I just don't know."
Each garbage bin has a number on it, so I told my neighbour that I would phone the town hall the next morning and ask for my number. If my assigned number doesn't match the number on the garbage bin, then we would know that it's his. Truthfully, I suspected that the garbage bin sitting in my garage was really his because I didn't think mine was quite so dirty.
While I was waiting for town hall to open so I could phone, I decided to do some detective work to try and figure out what happened to my bin. After all, I didn't want to sound like a dimwit on the phone.
First of all, I decided that no one stole it — at least not on purpose. Who would steal a garbage bin? It's gross to touch your own, let alone someone else's.
Therefore I rationally concluded that my other neighbour must have two garbage bins. He must have brought one in and his live-in girlfriend must have brought another in, not realizing that they now have two.
"OK, that probably doesn't make any sense either," I thought. "How do you not notice that you have two garbage bins in your garage? They are colossal-sized and take up an irritating amount of valuable garage space.
"There has to be another explanation." As I looked out my bedroom window to see if I could gain some insight, I noticed that, five houses down the road, there was a lonely garbage bin sitting on the curb. Either the owners have for three days forgotten to bring in their garbage bin, or that one must be mine.
"Wow! That reasoning is even more ludicrous! How can a garbage bin travel on its own that far away?" As I looked out the window again, I saw that the owner finally noticed his garbage bin and brought it in.
"Well, I give up," I thought. "I guess I am just going to have phone the town hall and admit I don't know where my garbage bin is. Boy! That sounds dumb."
I humbled myself and dialed the number. I ended up talking to a very nice, but very crazy man who confirmed that the garbage bin in my garage wasn't mine. He said that the wind probably blew mine away.
I knew that the right thing at that moment was to keep my mouth shut, but I just couldn't. I had to ask. "How in the world can the wind, unless it's a tornado, blow my garbage bin out of sight?"
His response was — you are not going to believe this, but it's the truth — "Oh sure, it can."
I immediately decided not to encourage any further conversation. The man was obviously delusional, or perhaps he had seen "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" one too many times. But he was still very nice. He told me that I would receive a brand new, I-don't-have-to-clean-in-the-spring garbage bin next Tuesday free of charge.
I am happy now, but it still bugs me that I don't know what happened to my garbage bin.
Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever had something you really wanted to know but couldn't find the answer to?
Of course, when I studied mathematics, I would always get excited when this happened. If I had a challenging question, I would work gloriously at it until I found the answer.
But unfortunately life isn't always like that. Sometimes you have to accept that you just don't know, and may never know on earth, the answer to life's perplexities. However, we can have faith that God knows everything and that one day we will have the answers to our questions.
"Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
His understanding has no limit."
Psalm 147:5
It is too bad our understanding has limits because I sure wish I knew what happened to my garbage bin.
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