Blog Action Day

Today has been designated as Blog Action Day, with the goal of increasing awareness about issues involving the environment. 15,000 blogs have registered and large companies like Reddit and Google are supporting this effort. Basically, the goal is to get people thinking about the environment in a different way.

I’m sure there will be many excellent posts today about easy things you can do to benefit the environment or about the effects of global warming, and so on. So, instead of rehashing some of those ideas, admittedly with less research and information, I’d like to start a different kind of conversation.

Caring for the environment is not as much a political or national issue as it is a spiritual issue.

Here is an extended quote from a book I really enjoyed and was challenged by, Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell.

“God empowers creation (the Earth and it’s plants and animals) to make more and in doing so loads it with potential. It is going to grow and change and move and not be the same today as it was yesterday, and tomorrow it will move another day forward. Creation is loaded with potential and possibility and promise.

God then makes people whom 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 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.”

Rob Bell’s comment is just so poignant and appropriate for this discussion. God has not given us this Earth for us to do with it as we please. We are merely here for a short time. In this time we have the command of taking care of the Earth.

Caring for the Earth and its plants and animals is a vital part of living a life that is directed towards following God.