Buried Is Not Wasted
For years I couldn’t drive through that part of downtown.
Not because I didn’t know the streets.
Because I knew them too well.
Every alley carried a memory.
A loading dock.
A restaurant.
A hotel.
A bar we’d serviced.
Ghosts of a life I thought would become something else.
Years earlier, I had started a recycling company called AWARE.
At first it was just me and an old F-150.
A few bins.
A few accounts.
A few friends who dared to dream with me that maybe we could build something meaningful.
Over time it grew.
We were servicing restaurants, bars, hotels, and clubs all over San Diego. We helped launch downtown’s first recycling center.
But what I remember most isn’t the business.
It’s the people.
Men and women trying to get off the streets.
People battling addiction.
People trying to rebuild lives that had come apart.
The work was hard.
Broken glass exploding into the truck bed.
Heavy awkward bins.
Sore muscles.
The city smelled different after midnight.
The morning sun always seemed to light the sky on fire far sooner than I expected.
I’d come home exhausted, shower off the smell of downtown, then sit down to prepare a sermon.
For a while I lived in both worlds.
Entrepreneur and pastor.
Recycling routes and Bible studies.
2am loading docks and 10am Sunday mornings.
With just enough time between to piece together a sermon from the scraps I’d been feeding my soul.
But eventually the church began growing, and I realized I couldn’t keep giving myself fully to both.
Something had to give.
So I handed the company over to my business partner and stepped away…
Six months later it was gone.
Just like that.
Years of work.
Years of sacrifice.
Years of dreaming.
Gone.
And if I’m honest, it crushed me.
Not immediately.
The disappointment settled in slowly.
Like dust.
I remember feeling embarrassed.
Like I had failed.
Like I had wasted years of my life.
The late nights and early mornings.
The missed moments with my kids.
The cuts from broken glass.
The exhaustion that seemed to settle into every corner of my soul.
The countless sacrifices.
What was the point?
I never said those words out loud.
But they were there.
Lurking beneath the surface.
For a long time, I avoided that part of downtown.
Not intentionally.
I just found other routes.
Other coffee shops.
Other reasons not to be there.
Then one morning I had breakfast with a friend nearby.
Afterward he asked if I wanted to take a walk.
I didn’t.
As I tried to explain why, all the words came bubbling to the surface with their attached emotions.
He listened.
He prayed over me.
Then he challenged me to take the walk.
Reluctantly, I gave in…
I’m so glad I did.
As we wandered through the neighborhood, something unexpected happened.
I started running into people from the old AWARE days.
One couple we had helped get housing years earlier was still off the streets.
Still sober.
Still together.
Still doing well.
Then a man stopped me on the sidewalk.
I hadn’t seen him in years.
“Pastor, will you pray for me?”
We stood there on the sidewalk.
Cars passing.
People hurrying to wherever people hurry in downtown San Diego.
The smell of restaurants opening for lunch drifting into the street.
And as I prayed over him and held him close, his eyes filled with tears.
Right there in the middle of an ordinary day.
Life moving in every direction around us.
And for a moment it felt as though God had pulled back the curtain on a story I thought had already ended.
The business had died.
But the fruit hadn’t.
The structure disappeared.
The kingdom remained.
The company was gone.
But somehow the love, the prayers, the conversations, the acts of service… they were still alive in places I’d been avoiding.
Standing there on that sidewalk, I realized God had been tending a garden I could no longer see.
I stood there realizing that not a single callus had been wasted.
Not a single bruise.
Not a single late night.
Not a single sacrifice.
Not because the business succeeded.
It didn’t.
At least not in the way I hoped.
But because God had been measuring something different than I was.
Standing on that sidewalk, I realized Jesus had already told this story.
Not about recycling companies.
About seeds.
About things that disappear before they bear fruit.
About a kingdom that often does its deepest work underground.
Jesus once said the kingdom of God is like a seed scattered into the ground.
The farmer sleeps.
Wakes.
Goes about his ordinary life.
And somehow beneath the surface, the seed grows.
He doesn’t know how.
He can’t force it.
He can’t control it.
Life is happening underground.
I think that’s difficult for most of us because we live in a world obsessed with visible outcomes.
We want proof.
Progress.
Evidence that our efforts are working.
We want to know it mattered.
But seeds disappear before they emerge.
That’s what seeds do.
They go underground.
And when something stays underground long enough, it’s easy to assume it’s dead.
Maybe you’ve felt that way.
About a dream.
A relationship.
A business.
A ministry.
A prayer you’ve prayed for years.
Maybe there are seasons of your life you struggle to revisit because they feel like monuments to disappointment.
Places where you invested your heart and received less than you hoped.
Places where you quietly wonder if any of it mattered.
I’ve asked those questions.
Maybe you have too.
But standing on that sidewalk that morning, I realized something I had missed for years.
Buried and wasted are not the same thing.
From the surface they can look almost identical.
Both disappear.
Both seem absent.
Both leave behind silence.
But one is an ending.
The other is a beginning.
One is abandonment.
The other is planting.
And sometimes we don’t know which is which until much later.
Long after we’ve stopped looking.
Long after we’ve given up trying to understand.
Long after we’ve concluded the story is over.
Maybe that’s why Jesus spoke so often about seeds.
Because seeds require a kind of faith most of us struggle to practice.
The faith to believe something is happening beneath the surface when there is no evidence yet that it is.
The faith to trust that hidden does not mean forgotten.
The faith to trust that silence does not mean absence.
The faith to trust that God can bring life out of things that look dead.
Once Jesus said that unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
The gospel itself is the story of a Seed.
A carpenter from Nazareth.
A cross.
A tomb.
A long silent Saturday.
Then resurrection.
What looked like defeat became salvation.
What looked buried became the source of life for the world.
Because of Him, burial is never the final word.
I still think about that walk sometimes.
About the people.
About the tears.
About the prayers.
About the fruit that survived after the structure disappeared.
And whenever I do, I find myself wondering how many other things I’ve misjudged because I evaluated them too early.
How many prayers are still alive underground.
How many acts of faithfulness are quietly bearing fruit somewhere beyond my sight.
How many seasons I called failures that God calls planting.
What I had mistaken for a grave was actually a garden.