God and the Environment
I, for one, am relieved. I have always felt that as Christians we have a responsibility to the planet that is in our care. Some people say, “but God gave it to us.” For them I have a question: if your father gave you a brand new care and said, “I give you dominion over this car”, and then you trashed it and never cleaned it and the interior was totally stained and the exterior was indistinguishable from a sandstone bar- would your father be pleased with you? Would you expect a lecture on the responsibility we have to those things that we are given?
The morality I was raised with says that possession is a sacred trust. You are to take care of the things you have. Keep your house clean, take care of your cars, don’t trash things. Be responsible. Doubly and triply so with things that will be handed down to others. You don’t gouge holes in the heirloom cherry table top. You don’t rip the fabric on mom’s Italian leather sofa. You don’t go digging for worms with Grandpa’s antique staff from WWII (really, you don’t- not unless you wanted to get spanked with the rapier that twists out of the handle.)
God has given us this planet, and we need to give it to our children. They need to give it to THEIR children.
Simply because something is ours doesn’t mean we have the right to destroy it- after all, if we destroyed everything within our possession, what would we be left with? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Causing blight is, indeed, a sinful thing.
Random Monday
In Politics: If “Change” is the theme of the primaries, why does it all sound like politics as usual?
In Religion: Prayer can be like sex in a marriage. First you can’t possibly get enough and you do it four times a day and never really think about the quality. Then you start to want to have it better, even if it’s less. Then, one day, you notice it’s been months and you wonder, “how is this possible?” and the next time you try it, you feel like you’ve forgotten what it’s all about. Pray-a-Thons on TV are like Christian pornography, which explains why so many non-Christians find it offensive. They are seeing something that was meant to be done behind closed doors.
In Family: I’ve noticed that almost all five year olds seem to go through a stage where they have short term memory loss every time they do something wrong, which is why my children will be going straight from age four to age six.
In Health: I find it amusing that there are so many sex articles coming out post Valentine’s Day. Or is it pre-Spring? In any case, this time of year seems to make sex leak in to everything. Unlike bacon, sex does NOT make everything better. It must be used appropriately and in reasonable amounts, or like bacon you will regret having so much later. There’s the thought for the day: Sex is like bacon, sex is not like bacon. Also: Sex and bacon should only be combined in carefully controlled environments.
In Literature: Stephen King’s Duma Key is definitely worth reading, but make sure you’ve got 30 hours of free time and enough food in the house. You won’t want to have to do ANYTHING but finish the book once you’re four chapters in. (Trust me on this- I stayed up until one reading it, despite the fact that I’d only gotten four hours of sleep the night before and my son was teething and I KNEW I’d be exhausted. Every time I turned off the lights I thought about the moon over the water and I freaked out and turned the lights back on so I could finish reading it and know that everything ended well, and then when the book ended I felt sick to my stomach and wanted to cry, but I LOVED it. Stephen King is an evil genius.)
In Movies: I’m really looking forward to the Spiderwick Chronicles, even though I’m already bracing myself for a letdown. It seems like I’m always bracing myself for a letdown these days. PRODUCERS: MAKE BETTER MOVIES. For the love of me, PLEASE! I have two small kids- if I bother to put on something not covered in ambiguously colored stains to go to the theater, I don’t want to be thinking, “and I could be napping in my car right now” the entire time. (ambiguous stain = is it poo or chocolate or blood? Do you WANT to know?)
In food: Pepsi and mint Milanos are SO close to being the perfect breakfast. All I want is a sausage link and a bowl of cherries. Mmm… Then I would have the four food groups: caffeine, chocolate, pork and fruit!
