In college I drove a cool red soft-top Jeep. Unbeknownst to me, my wife had declared to her dad at some point in her life that she was going to marry the first cute guy she met with a red Jeep. I covered the "red Jeep" part, anyway.
At any rate, I loved this little red Jeep. But I loved my friends even more. If someone needed to drive it somewhere, I was glad to lend out the keys.
My friends were welcome to drive it and even take the top off. But the people who knew me, knew that I loved my Jeep. And what I found was that the ones who knew me best were the most generous--refilling the tank with gas, for example. The ones who knew me best took the best care of my stuff--they did so because they knew me and knew that I loved my Jeep.
So it is with those of us who call ourselves Christians and this whole eye-roll inducing conversation in some circles about how involved we should be in issues of creation care.
We know the One who owns the place. He has lent it to us, granted us temporary and bounded power over all that he has created. And he commands us to care for it, to tend to it.
There is no question where Christians should be in issues of creation care if we read our Bibles. We should be out front. We know the Owner. We know that he loves people more than animals and plants, but not at the final expense of animals and plants. As people who know the Owner and who have been given a sacred trust, we respect what is his and we care for it even at great cost to ourselves.
Obviously we are to do so in keeping with what is actually true and happening. And this gets admittedly squirrely as there is much pressure on scientists to "spin" research to make things look about as bad as they possibly can. There are also those who would prefer to ignore even common-sense calls to conservation and caution for reasons that mostly have to do with money.
But those who object on the grounds of jobs lost are forgetting their history: necessity drives invention, invention often (though admittedly not always) drives employment. The growth of the automobile industry spelled the end of the horse-and-buggy industry. Some people lost jobs. But many more were invented.
Bottom line: honoring and loving Christ means honoring and loving his stuff. If we don't do that, we sin against him and our vision of what it means to be Christians is too narrow. My prayer is that Christians as a global community will wake up and take seriously what it means to honor God by caring for the earth he gave us.
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