Some mud flaps are better than others.

Probably the most prominent and famous are the mud flaps carrying the chromed, curvaceous woman.  Some would see them as harmless, but I would argue otherwise.  It has something to say about reality, about people, about God.  There is a theology to it.  It tells us that some people are only worth their physicality, that some people can be stripped of their intellect, their emotions, their being for our selfish consumption.

This, of course, is a form of pornography.  Porn strips a human body, not simply of clothing, but of mind and heart and dreams and relationships.  For our personal pleasure.  We’ve stripped the immeasurable spirit from their measurable soil.

And it doesn’t take the internet or a magazine or a mud flap to do it: we can objectify and sexualize our neighbor, too.  Or our partner.  There are so many ways we settle for the soil of the person standing right in front of us.

And this isn’t only about sex.  It happens in the check-out line: we fail to see the cashier as a fully human being, and then treat him as such: we fail to greet him, or even see him.  We pull out our phone…

It comes out in me on I-75.  Because it is a main artery through the eastern half of the country, much of what we buy and sell travels north and south through this corridor every day.  Which means lots of trucks.  Some of which have questionable mud flaps.  

These trucks can aggravate the hell out of me.  They drive too slow: don’t they know I have places to be?  They drive too fast: they’re going to run me over!  There’s way too many of them: sharing is hard.  I tend to treat the drivers as a human doing at best (get the stuff where it needs to be and get out of my way), an inanimate obstacle at worst (forgetting why they’re there in the first place).

One day, however, driving down I-75, I saw this mud flap: “Everything I carry is for you.  Be nice to me.”

Some mud flaps are better than others.

This is good theology.  It is a reminder of what our work actually is: we are not made to work simply for a pay check or for the weekend.  Work—good work!—is first and foremost about love: good work serves our neighbor, whether that be taking a pulse or checking groceries or transporting goods.

But it is also a reminder that this driver is doing that work.  A human being.

This driver attached a mud flap to her vehicle that reminds us that there is a spirit-ness to our soil: that our work is more than money, but also that every person is more than what we can get out of them.

It is a reminder not to strip the spirit from the soil of a person.  Which we do every time we click on that link.  Which we do every time we flip that driver off.  Which we do every time we fail to acknowledge the person who is serving us.  Which we do every time we boil another down to a progressive or conservative, a fundamentalist or a heretic.  Not helpful.

There is a spirit-ness to our soil.  And there is also a spirit-ness to their soil.