A meeting last night with a passionate, Jewish, self-proclaimed "enviro-geek" about the importance of switching over to CFLs in order to help restore God's good-yet-fallen creation has had me thinking all day.
And then Len at NextReformation goes and posts this about how "the single largest issue the church will face in this century is the environment." Citing, God's command in the Garden of Eden to take care of the "land" and Israel's history being inextricably bound up with God and the "land" (a word which he cites as being "the fourth most common noun in the the OT, occurring more frequently than even "covenant."") Lots of good stuff to think about there.
And then I'm reading Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis (book 10, week 10) and (are you ready?) he writes...
God then makes people who he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation, commanding them to care for creation , to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it. The words he gives are words of loving service and thoughtful use. From day one (which is really day six), they are in intimate relationship and interaction with their environment. They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment. is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence.
This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.
And until that last sentence makes perfect sense, we haven't fully grasped what it means to be human and to live in God's world. Everyone is an environmentalist. We cannot live independently of the world God has placed us in. We are intimately connected. By God...
...These first people have a choice: to do something with it in harmony with God or to use it for their own purposes. And not doing something with it is a choice as well. It would be a sin to abuse creation and distort it and rape it and exploit it, but it would also be a sin to do nothing with it. Because doing nothing with it would essentially be saying to God, "You have made nothing of interest to me."
And I guess I wonder...if the environment is indeed the "single largest issue the church will face in this century" (or even if it's just one of the big issues)...what kind of choices are we making? Are we doing things in harmony with God?
Our family has made a commitment to the following things when at all possible...
- Organic and locally grown food
- More public transportation/walking
- Replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs
- Using blankets and clothes instead of pumping up the heat all the time
- Eliminating fast food (and not using the drive through when fast food is our only option)
- Always recycling
What things are you doing as you wrestle with the spiritual issue of the environment in order to fall in harmony with what God is doing to restore it all? I long to celebrate your commitments (and pilfer your ideas.)
A great resource that was e-mailed to me: Ten Things You Can Do to Help Curb Global Warming
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