Go to the Boll Weevil: A Review of Joseph Bentz’s Nothing is Wasted

Early in Nothing is Wasted: How God Redeems What is Broken, Joseph Bentz writes of the people of the town of Enterprise, Alabama, who nearly 100 years ago saw over 60 percent of their cotton crop destroyed by the boll weevil.

Then there is the account of apparently huge waste in the death of a single whale.

Then there is the hard story of Jerry Deans, a writer Bentz met at a writer’s conference. Deans tells of losing his daughter in a swimming accident, a loss that would be enough to destroy anyone. Yet as other losses were to follow, the loss of a granddaughter, the loss of a brother's wife, and then an accident that left one of his twin sons paralyzed from the waist down and the other facing a life-threatening injury, lot of time would elapse before Deans could begin to make sense of his experiences. 

Redemption Does Not Obliterate Pain

I admit that in reading stories so true to life, so true to what we really experience and hear about, I had my doubts. Many of the stories told here seem hard and very real—the real news of the world we live in. How does God redeem such losses? Do people really recover from such devastations? Does it really happen? Or is that just the usual clichéd Christian response to suffering?

“This book does not treat suffering lightly,” Bentz writes, “nor does it try to explain it away or find an explanation for why it exists in the first place” (12). Instead, Bentz wishes to suggest that redemption can emerge from pain, though it never obliterates it. In a very real way, he sees pain and redemption as running along parallel tracks. 

“The story of …divine reversal is told most fully in the Bible” (13), he notes. But an emerging strength of his book really is found in the decision to see this “story” in the most unlikely places of loss and suffering. I admit that I was helped by the continued arguments in this book against the usual ways many well-meaning people who haven’t experience such tragedies try to respond to them.

How Does Resurrection Occur?

In reading these accounts, I began to think about my own suffering. I have understood that redemption doesn’t necessarily mean turning the clock back, getting back everything I lost and having it again as I had it before, or simply not feeling pain anymore. As Bentz suggests, pain is not removed or obliterated. It has been my experience that my losses have changed me, and that is perhaps what I have most hated about them. The process of grieving is long, and yet the cycle of loss and redemption, as Bentz sees it, seems built right into the universe as how God works.

The town of Enterprise mentioned above, for example, devastated by a boll weevil infestation, eventually found its footing when it turned from being a producer of cotton to producing peanuts. A new era of boll weevil-proof prosperity was theirs when they did this. They’ve even gone so far as to erect a statue, not of liberty or of a soldier, but of the insect itself that led them to make the changes they needed to make.

Suffering and Transformation

Though it might seem clichéd, a further example is the account Bentz gives of the caterpillar into butterfly transformation story. Again, this might seem dangerously close to being too familiar as a neat, clean, easy cliché. Not in Bentz’s hands, however. Here, the naturalistic rendering of the process wherein the caterpillar is melted into nothing but goo redeems the cliché. It makes this account into something even the biblical King Solomon would approve of. “Go to the ant” becomes here “Go to the caterpillar,” an account that restored my belief that the road to redemption is not easy, but it is possible and real.  

As full disclosure, I will also note that Jospeh Bentz is a friend, and over the last year and a half, I had the opportunity to hear him, on a few occasions, talking about what he was discovering in his work with this subject. However, I will admit that hearing those few, scattered accounts did not do justice to the complete work we have in Nothing is Wasted. In this work, Bentz offers an involving account of suffering and redemption that is honest, highly readable, and humane. His voice is that of a fellow traveler. There are moments of sadness, of wonder, and humility in this powerful book that stands above other books on Christian living. 

(Joseph Bentz, a professor of American Literature at Azusa Pacific University. He is a frequent speaker and the author of four novels and five books on Christian living. For more information, go to www.josephbentz.com.)