There are a number of stories from my life that could go under a category called “How in the hand-holding picnic line dances of Central Asia did I end up here?” In spite of my heartfelt desire to pursue wise risk, I have periodically found myself in situations where those decisions instead led to circumstances somewhat dangerous, or at least absurd. For instance, one time I ended up working for an organization that turned out to be involved in international money laundering and harboring wanted fugitives. Believe it or not, they accomplished these crimes by recycling used clothes and shoes.
When I was finishing up university and heading into marriage, I was looking for more flexible work that would pay well. One day I was scanning the nonprofit jobs section of the (admittedly hit-or-miss) website, Craigslist when I came across a curious posting. An environmental organization was looking for drivers who could find new sites for their clothing and shoe donation bins. The gig was simple. Contractor drivers would travel around their part of the country asking local businesses if they would be willing to host one of these tall metal bins on their property as a service to the community and as a way to contribute to sustainable development projects in India and Africa. For each site you secure, you’d get paid $125, a sum which at that point equaled ten hours of my other work at a furniture warehouse. And I would get to set my own schedule – a very appealing thing to a flexibility-loving individual like me.
Interested in seeing if this was all legit, I applied, explaining in my email that while I was not necessarily an environmentalist myself, I was a Christian who did believe in the wisdom of creation stewardship and sound development projects overseas. I also had one year of experience in relief and development work in the Middle East. Apparently, this was enough to land me the job. I met the woman who would become my boss for an interview at the same coffee shop where my wife and I had hosted our engagement party. She was a mysterious figure in her sixties, of Danish ethnicity. She offered me the role after a relatively brief conversation. Given that she was married to a woman and also a card-carrying member of the pseudo-religious climate apocalypse culture, I found it curious that she didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that I was not only a conservative Christian, but a student at a Southern Baptist Bible college to boot. Not for the last time, I thanked God that humans really are remarkably inconsistent creatures.
I soon began my job and took to it right away. I had the freedom to drive around and stop at every gas station and corner store in a two-hour radius of my city and ask if they’d like to host a clothes and shoe recycling bin on their property. Even though I didn’t fully buy into the philosophy behind my new employers’ work, I could get behind the substance of it – keeping Americans’ excess clothing, shoes, books, etc., out of landfills and redirecting them toward more productive places. I was told that some of the best quality items would be donated in the US, the second tier items would be resold overseas, and others beyond redemption would be shredded so they could be used in other products, like the insulation inside car doors. The money from the items resold was said to go toward projects in India and Africa, such as farming methods that were better for soil, used less water, and led to better crop yields. Again, this is all stuff a Christian can support who understands that though this world is temporary, it’s still ours to steward responsibly.
In fact, the conversations I had with coworkers in this season became a good chance to sharpen my beliefs when it came to creation care. I came to see that when individuals, companies, and governments abuse the natural ecosystems around them, it’s almost always the poor who suffer. Given the strong biblical concern for the poor, we do well to care about commonsense protection of clean air, water, and soil. Globally and historically, when we treat the natural world out of a posture of “it’s all going to burn anyway,” we often thereby poison the orphan and widow. For a Christian, that should be something that’s very concerning. If you doubt what I’m saying here, just visit places like China in the winter and try not to breathe in the soupy-thick air pollution. Sadly, the workers in those cities will lose around five years of their lives from simply breathing in that poisoned air.
As I drove around rural Kentucky, I also spent a lot of time thinking about the wisdom of learning from God’s creation logic when it comes to many of the renewable cycles baked into natural ecosystems. I remember learning about the “waste is food” principle present in nature and chewing on how we could better emulate this wisdom of God’s creation in our societies. I remember talking about this with one of my pastors and bringing up our reliance on fossil fuels as something I felt was unnatural to the created order. He, however, told me not to forget that everything on our green earth is in fact dependent on a giant star of burning gas. Good point. Fossil fuel energy is a natural part of the created order, just something that we need to keep learning how to use as God has.
Ultimately, I came away from this season of working for pagan environmentalists having a more thought-out biblical theology of creation care. And for that I’m grateful. This can be a blindspot in American evangelicalism, and even more so now that it is so highly politicized. But there’s something to Lewis’ and Tolkien’s instinct to stick up for the trees in their writings. In the end, the heart of evil is to tear up and ruin creation, while God desires to see it gardened into an even more beautiful and productive version of itself. Our theology should somehow reflect these realities. Even as we seek to share the gospel and reach the nations, Christians should in their own small way plant gardens in Babylon – not out of some kind of apocalyptic panic, but as a nod toward Eden lost, and toward the coming resurrected Earth.
I also learned curious things about people and cultures while doing this job. The businesses most likely to say yes to this opportunity to host a free donation bin were those run by internationals, or by very liberal Americans. Gas stations run by South Asians and smoke shops run by white hippies were promising places to stop. But conservative Americans (many of them seemingly Christians) tended to bristle when I made my spiel. This was curious because when it came to other jobs I had worked where tipping was involved, these dynamics tended to be reversed. The conservatives tipped (gave) generously if you demonstrated you were willing to work hard, but they were not interested in anything that smacked of a handout. The fact that this was all free and easy and helped farmers in Africa seemed to make them even more suspicious. Then again, perhaps they were right to raise an eyebrow at this whole operation.
I had just successfully recruited one of my close friends to join me when some very strange revelations came to light. He and I were on a paid weekend trip to Atlanta where we attended a bunch of trainings/hype sessions with a number of other NGOs and companies that all seemed strangely intertwined with our org. Curiously, all of them were also headed up by someone from Denmark, people who had gone to university with our boss back in the 1960s. The whole vibe was like one big family reunion, though these were alleged to be independent organizations and companies involved in the used clothes market. Into this unusual context, my friend was forwarded some very concerning investigative articles.
Apparently, there was a reason all of the groups present at this weekend’s event in Atlanta seemed related. They were. They had all descended from a leftist professor in 1960s Denmark and his cadre of loyal students. Allegedly, when their radical movement was banned from Denmark, they went international, starting a network of companies, non-profits, and schools in multiple countries. They really were committed to environmentalism of some sort, and some project sites really existed in Africa and India. But they were also committed to money laundering. Some of the funds from the donations had illegally gone toward paying for a condo in Florida, where the founder of the movement had hidden for some years as he tried to elude Interpol. If this were true, then who knew where the funds from the bins we had placed were actually going? A few months previously, I had been asked to open up the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I had placed dozens and dozens of bins all over that metro area, work that could result in a substantial amount of money from all of the donations received.
My believing friend and I grew more and more alarmed as we read page after page of investigative reporting that accused our employer of some very egregious things. Even if this network of inbred entities was still operating legally in the US, things were beginning to feel awfully dodgy. There wasn’t yet the kind of fire that led to legal action, but there was a lot of smoke. And even worse, just the week before our organization had asked the two of us to represent them to our city council.
This is the point where the question dropped: How in the world had we ended up here? The two of us were preparing for gospel ministry. We were busy students, just trying to work hard and be faithful and save money to take care of young families. Now we were unwitting employees of money launderers. We knew that we didn’t have the time nor the connections to do the work required to verify or discount the many accusations present if anyone simply googled the name of our employer. So, we prayed – and then decided it was time to bail. Now that our eyes were opened to see we’d been working for some kind of shadowy hippy mafia, we were conscience-bound to get out, and that as fast as possible.
Our boss was very upset at us for quitting – and for asking questions. “I don’t dig into your strange religious background, do I?!” But she ultimately resigned herself to our position that we were in no place to prove or disprove the things we had heard, and that meant we needed to bow out. My friend and I explained that we wanted to someday be men who were above reproach. And this meant not working for groups allegedly involved in setting up recycling fronts for money laundering.
Many years later, I still see the tall green bins scattered around our city here in the US. They are looking quite faded and beat up these days, but their presence means the organization must still be functioning. Somehow, they must still be legal, still under a cloud of accusations, yes, but continuing to hustle nonetheless.
If there is a lesson to this strange tale it might be to stay away from job offers on Craigslist. Or, don’t be afraid to trust God and bail if you find out your employers are doing illegal things. Or, if you are in need of donating your used clothes in the US, then stay away from the tall metal bins you might see planted around your city. They are awfully convenient, and they claim to be helping the planet. But as far as I can tell, they belong to some kind of hippy mafia, people who want to use your old clothes and shoes for dodgy, and even wicked, ends. (My old shoes? Really, Evil? Really??)
Yes, let’s seek to grow in caring for creation. We are God’s redeemed gardeners, after all. But I’m sure that we can find a better way to do this than by donating to the hippy mafia.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 