The United States Supreme Court has ruled that it is not illegal to rummage through other people’s garbage.

According to Dr. William Rathje, a Ph.D. from Harvard who calls himself a garbologist, a great deal can be learned about the life style of a family simply by rummaging through their garbage bin.

He cites as an example that lower income neighborhoods tend to dump used motor oil, spark plugs and the like. Middle income families will have more paint and varnishes in their trash, while the upper income families tend to spend more on pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.

There are also more intimate things that can be learned by sorting through the things people throw away. A family’s credit status, its political affiliations, its eating and drinking habits and its romantic interests are all revealed by what it throws away.

Would you mind if we were to rummage through your garbage? What would we learn about your life style that you would rather we did not know?

Everything about us is known by our Heavenly Father, and even if we wrap, shred, or burn the things we would rather others did not see, they are all known by God, for even the very hairs of our head are all numbered.

Most of us would rather not have others reading our personal mail. Yet, the letters we write and receive are all read by God, even those which are never mailed.

There have been times when we have written a rather strong letter, especially after having received one, or having been confronted by an angry reader or listener. Fortunately, we have had the good sense to throw it away, instead of mailing it. Anyone rummaging through our garbage that day would have had their hair stand on end by what they found.

We believe God when He assures us that He will ”cleanse us from all unrighteousness and will forgive our sins,” but only if we confess them to Him.

In His wisdom, God has given us the privilege of reading other people’s mail and we can learn a great deal by faithfully reading those letters. We call them ”epistles” and they are the letters that Paul, Peter, James, John and Jude wrote to help others in their walk to the kingdom. They have been preserved for our benefit, ”for whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”

Let us read and reread these letters and take from them the spiritual lessons that helped those to whom they were addressed ”patiently continue in well doing.”

The more we study and digest the contents of the epistles in scripture, written so long ago to encourage us to ”continue in the faith, grounded and settled, and [to] be not moved away from the hope of the gospel,” the better looking our own personal garbage will be.

Then in ”the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ,” our Lord will approve of not only what we threw away, but also what we did while we waited for him to return. He will say to us, ”Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”