I’m embarrassed to write this post, but I’m going to anyway because I think it’s important. It’s about what we throw away.

The weekend was warm and our boys wanted to go to a swimming pool. Scott and I were hard at work on the farm. “No pools are open yet,” I told the boys as I walked by pushing a wheelbarrow toward the garden I was planting.

“Our pool leaks,” they said. Their pool cost $17 dollars at Walmart last season.

“Sorry, you can help your dad and I work some more or you can play in the hose, but do it around the trees. They need to be watered.”

Pretty soon I see the boys had improvised. Using an old tarp that didn’t leak, they fixed their Walmart pool, and spent the sunny afternoon having fun in it.

But this isn’t what I want to talk about today. What I want to say leaves me feeling kind of sad and kind of embarrassed and honestly, just plain sorry for where we are as a society right now.

Our thirteen-year-old son, John, came home from school on Friday and informed me he’d eaten a fabulous lunch. Scott and the boys leave at 5:30 am on Friday mornings for men’s prayer breakfast so I don’t get out of bed that early to make the boys lunch like I do on other days.

“Where did you get this fabulous lunch?” I asked, thinking Scott must have taken John to lunch since Scott is a teacher at John’s school and they have a lunch hour together.

“Some kid threw his lunch in the garbage. So I dug it out and it was so good. Everything was sealed. Nothing touched the garbage. The kid had these amazing cookies and a sandwich and…”

“You ate a kid’s lunch out of the trash?!” I was appalled. And upset. And just couldn’t believe it.

“Ya, the cookies were awesome! When kids throw away a perfectly good lunch, I pull it out of the trash. Everything’s sealed. It’s still in the bag. Kids do this all the time so I eat their lunches sometimes.” John grinned.

My heart sank. I felt like a terrible mom. Some days I don’t make John a lunch because Scott is at the school and I figure he will feed John. Some days we run out of bread and sandwich makings and John’s lunch is pretty measly. Some days I’m in the laundry room digging change out of my jar to scrounge enough money for John to buy a cheap lunch at the school snack bar. Sometimes coming up with lunches for all five of our boys is a challenge.

See why writing this post embarrasses me? Making ends meet at our house is tough sometimes. But John is a resourceful kid. He takes after his Opa, always fixing stuff, building stuff, using stuff up. He doesn’t waste a thing and he’s about as far from spoiled as a kid can get. If John was lost in the wilderness, I wouldn’t worry about him. He once killed a rattlesnake with my strawberry-cleaning knife. I’m just glad he didn’t eat that snake.

But our son eating out of the trash at school shocked and humbled me. It also made me feel sad for kids who’ve never been hungry. Never had to go without a lunch. Never had to make a swimming pool out of a tarp and a broken Walmart baby pool.

You know, I must confess, I’ve thrown away a lot of food in my lifetime. I’ve also thrown away some other perfectly good stuff. And I nearly threw away my marriage when it got hard years ago.

My grandparents didn’t throw anything away. Grandma’s closet wasn’t very big, but when she went out or went to church, she always looked lovely, even though she didn’t have a lot of clothes. Mostly, I remember my grandma working really hard in my grandparents’ peach orchard, or working in the yard, or feeding her chickens, or feeding her family. Grandma was always working and taking care of other people. She knew the value of people and food and what we need to get through life, which really isn’t much in the way of stuff. The only thing Grandma ever wasted was perhaps her words on my grandpa when he made her mad. Grandpa liked to tease my grandma and sometimes this riled her.

My parents don’t live as frugally as my grandparents who survived the Great Depression, but they certainly would never throw a perfectly good lunch away. And they would never expect a free lunch without working for it. They also wouldn’t buy something they couldn’t afford. I remember the year my dad’s engineering business didn’t do well because of a recession. My parents sold most of our cattle herd and two of their vehicles to get by that year. I don’t think it ever crossed their minds to take out a loan or ask for help.

When I was a teenager, I had my own bedroom, my own car, and my own closet full of nice clothes. A closet twice as big as my grandma’s. I wouldn’t throw away a whole lunch when I was John’s age, but if I didn’t like my sandwich, I’d probably toss half of it.

I doubt any kids of my grandparents’ generation would have thrown their food away. My parents’ generation probably wouldn’t have tossed food, either. My generation was well-fed because our parents wanted us to have what they didn’t have growing up with parents who survived the Great Depression. Today’s generation is well beyond that. We’ve become a wasteful society.

What we really need is to teach our kids the value of using things up and making do with what we have and fixing stuff when it’s broken instead of just throwing it away and buying something new. We also need to teach our children not to throw away their relationships.

The other day I was talking to a mom of adult kids who said young people today don’t want to get married. Today’s generation thinks it’s perfectly okay to be baby daddies or baby mommies without a spouse on board. Maybe that’s perfectly okay for the young adult living life on their terms, but what about the baby who doesn’t have a mommy or a daddy because mommy or daddy just hooked up for some fun and ended up with a baby?

Too many times, I hear young adults say, “I don’t want to get married. I just want to have fun!”

When did fun become so important in our society?

What are we teaching our kids today?

Marriages have value.

Broken things have value.

School lunches have value.

We need to teach our kids not to just throw stuff away. Because the truth is they’ve learned it from us. They’ve watched us throw our relationships away. They’ve watched us throw perfectly good stuff away. They’ve watched us throw food away.

We need to get back to living the way our grandparents lived, making do, and making use of what we already have. Last month my horse broke the reins on her bridle. So I went into a saddle shop to have the reins fixed. Actually I took an old rope in with me to see how much the guy would charge to make it into reins because my leather reins weren’t long enough to fix.

“That rope is old. I’m not goin’ fix that. Go buy yourself some new reins.” He pointed me over to the rack of new reins.

Well, the new reins were $85 dollars. I walked back over to the guy. “Do you have the parts so I can fix these reins myself?” With a peeved looked on his face, he pointed me to the back of the his store where a little shelf held buckles and snaps and metal fasteners.

I picked out what I needed, and with my old rope, went back to the new reins section. There, I sat down on the floor with the new reins and my old rope and snaps and buckles on my lap and spent half an hour figuring out how to make myself some reins out of that old rope by looking at how the new reins were made. When I was done, I hung the new reins back on the rack and went to the counter to pay for my snaps and buckles now attached to my old rope.

It cost me $12 dollars and a little bit of pride to fix my bridle. The guy wasn’t happy. I wanted to say, “Look, buddy, I’d love to have those new reins, but I can’t afford them. I’m feeding five growing boys right now. And this old rope made a great pair of reins. I can ride my horse again, thank you very much.”

The truth is: what we throw away says a lot about us as a society. My grandparents made use of everything they had and saved all the scraps of broken stuff so they could fix other things when they broke. Honestly, if I’d had the cash to buy those new reins I would have happily gotten them for myself without thinking twice about it. But I’m glad I couldn’t afford them. I’m glad I had to learn how to make my own reins. Making my own reins was good for me. It made me a little more grateful for what I already have. Like an old rope that has become my new reins.