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I awoke on Sunday, 13 May 1973, in a 12-story men’s dormitory on the campus of Oklahoma State University, the only person in the building. As the brilliant morning light shone through my window, I had awakened as a newly minted graduate of that staid institution, not fully awake, but fully prepared to take on the world.
Days including graduations, weddings, funerals, and the birth of your own children are like that. They are indelibly etched into your memory so that no effort is required to recall the specific dates and retain clear recollections of the pre and post event incidents and experiences, even over more than half a century.
Such was this specific May morning. I clearly remember standing up and looking through my open window at what would soon become T. Boone Pickens Stadium on the OSU campus. The population of Stillwater, Oklahoma, halved itself in one day as nearly all the students had already departed campus.
I was the only one left in Cordell Hall for a reason. I was here because I had accepted a job assignment from my boss, Head Resident Dr. Craig Robinson, my very first employment opportunity after I had become a certified diploma-carrying graduate. It paid an incredible $50 for one day’s work! Not bad in 1973 (equivalent to approximately $381 in 2026).
On this beautiful Sunday morning, after four years of struggling through the university in a rigorous field of study, I was about to take my very first steps as a learned scholar less than 24 hours after accepting the rolled and ribboned diploma…
…as a trashman.
I walked out into the huge parking lot of the dorm and directed my steps toward the object of my labor – two giant, empty dumpsters with lids tossed back, open and ready for the first extraordinary harvest, the result of years of academia.
My boss walked up behind me while I was surveying the dumpsters. I turned around and faced him with a wide smile and then burst into laughter, saying something profound about my very first paid job as a college graduate.
It was hilarious at the beginning. However, it soon became actual work as it required an entire day to carry all the trash left behind by hundreds of young college men on their way out the door. I filled both dumpsters and more, and in the process discovered how incredibly wasteful young college-aged men are wont to be. I also discovered, to no one’s surprise, what young college-aged men absolutely do not want to bring home in the very likely event that Mom comes across their “treasures” while digging for laundry.
My summer “break” began the next day, just like all the rest of the summers before, because I was headed back to OSU after summer break for my first year of graduate school.
Over the years, I have thought many times about the significance of knowing that my first paid job, less than a day after receiving my university diploma, was as a trashman. The first steps are always memorable, so why did my sovereign God pick that specific one for me – one that I could never forget?
I have come to realize over the intervening more than half a century that the very worst state of spiritual and personal error that any human can fall into is pride. This sin is a fast-spreading, metastasizing cancer that God despises, because the one filled with pride has displaced Him with self. And since God knows His created beings far, far better than they can ever know themselves, it grieves and even angers Him. The sin of pride is the ultimate idolatry because the idol stares back at you from the mirror each day, and is lovingly admired and groomed before leaving the house.
Being a trashman (especially as a young man in the early 1970’s) was truthfully humbling and even demeaning on many levels. And as I worked, I was very happy that the other students were gone.
Yet… even that feeling is one that is engendered only by pride.
And that is precisely why God orchestrated this signature moment in my life. He loved me enough to carve out this essentially important event at a key time to tattoo that memory on my heart to carry around for life. It was humbling, but it was also powerful and provided me with a pivotal experience to accompany me through the rest of my days.
“Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished.” (Proverbs 16:5)
God wanted his bond-slave (in Greek – doulos), Dennis, to be a man of humility, not a man of pride. I was created to be a doulos of God and to His people. Hence, throughout my life, God has lovingly humbled the ugly, prideful Dennis through occasional very harsh and painfully necessary discipline, placing me on His operating table and ridding me of the fast-spreading metastasizing disease that I had willingly took on and allowed to grow.
“Before destruction a man’s heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor.” (Proverbs 18:12)
“Now the man Moses was very humble, more than any man who was on the face of the Earth.” (Numbers 12:3)
And Moses was a true friend of God in his time, more than any other, which is the primary reason he was used by God in such incredible ways.
So, what does God require of me on my way to Zion’s glittering gates?
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
You see, for the rest of my life, my God desired for me to worship Him and Him alone in perfect but reinforced humility – and to never, ever go around worshiping the trashman!