Four Words for Earth Day 2013

For an hour yesterday, sixty neighbors and church friends fanned out through the parks, nature trails and public spaces around our neighborhood and collected 650 lbs of litter.

It was a celebration of Earth Day that I think would have made Earth-maker smile. Kids and parents had fun together, neighbors met or got re-connected, the landscape looks much better for our efforts, and the ducks, snakes and other wildlife in the area have a healthier habitat.

Call it a springtime facelift or an overdue winter cleanup, this little act of earth-keeping and creation care was a way of giving something back to the land that gives so generously to us all.

As a follower of Jesus, I'm taking Earth Day as a chance to say three words to my Creator – no, make that four.

The first word is an exclamatory “O”! What a marvelously complex gift so full of wonder and joy! Today is one for praise – I know that because at 4:30 this morning a cardinal was straining to teach me his canticle outside my window!

The second word is “Thanks”! Thanks for such a lavish and generous gift that keeps on giving. Thanks for the privilege of life amid such beauty and wisdom.

Thanks for the privilege and honor of being entrusted with such extravagant resources. I could sit at the top of the food chain like a little emperor, as if it was all for my benefit alone, but I can’t. I’m convinced that the gifts of advanced reason and language, culture and technology are given so that you and I, together with the whole cosmos, can give glory back to our Creator.

But that leads to my third word – “Sorry” – because clearly our tribe has done more than its fair share of hogging the spoils of the earth without regard to others – whether our global neighbors or the generations to follow us. This Earth Day for the first time, I think, I’m groaning a little in synch with the whole creation that groans under the oppressive weight of human recklessness and disregard, my own included. There is room for confession, lament and apology.

And so my last word is “Yes” – a joyful repentant “yes”!. “Yes, my Lord and God, I long to do your will! Yes, I will open my eyes to be more attentive and mindful of the gifts and mercy you give me every day, every hour! Yes, I will join you, generous God, in being a giver, not just a taker!

And Yes, I join with others who care about the well-being, the shalom, of the world you have given us!”

Yes, Yes, Yes! Happy Earth Day.

P.S. Three of these four words are inspired by Brian McLaren's Naked Spirituality - A Life with God in 12 Simple Words. 

Water on Thirsty Ground

In the summer of 2012 ninety percent of USA counties declared a state of emergency due to drought conditions. Corn crops shriveled and grain prices soared. 2013 doesn't look any more promising - at least in the West with low winter snowfall in the Rockies and projections that river-flows across the western states will be below average in 2013, as they have been for ten of the last 13 years.

Some ecologists today feel it is too late to talk about ‘sustainable’ strategies and focus instead on being ‘resilient’ as the earth's environment moves into deepening crisis.

Chronic drought can be debilitating, not just on the landscape, but in every area of life. Drought comes in many forms – when inspiration fails, when customers, job prospects or funding sources dry up … when marriage turns sour or brittle, or a daughter no longer calls home. Droughts like these cry out for relief just as desperately as farmers scan the sky for signs of rain.

That’s where some lines from the prophet Isaiah sing out to us with glistening hope:

I will pour water out on the thirsty land.
I will make streams flow on the dry ground.
I will pour out my Spirit on your children.
I will pour out my blessing on their children after them.
They will spring up like grass in a meadow.
They will grow like poplar trees near flowing streams.
Isaiah 44:3-4

Isaiah’s words came to the Jewish exiles in ancient Babylon as they wilted in ghetto communities and labor camps along the Euphrates. They were surrounded by physical water, but their souls were dry, their faith was parched, the future looked barren. Their children felt rootless with fading interest in the old traditions, culture and faith.

A 2012 study of church drop-out rates among young adults in Canada called Hemorrhaging Faith paints a similarly bleak picture. The landscape looks dry and unpromising and the status quo is surely unsustainable.

But barren landscapes don't tell the whole story. Isaiah invites us to embrace his song about rain and renewal, about God’s life-giving Spirit breaking into a new generation, about grass springing up in parched woodlots and poplars lining the riverbank – pictures of growth, vitality and a promising future.

This song – God’s song – counters the fear of the exiles – and the fears that paralyze us today. And parents, pastors and youth workers around the world can hear this song between the lines of Hemorrhaging Faith.

The larger context of Isaiah's song is about God as Creator and Redeemer, a God who calls us by name, who exposes the pipe-dream vanities, the contradictions and chaos that undermine our lives, a God who invites us instead into relationship and partnership in his mission to transform the dry and thirsty world.

That's a powerful song for today - the first day of Spring 2013. And Friday is World Water Day.  Until then, sing!

Image Credits:
Drought Map - Circle of Blue
Fresh Grass - Vanashree
Hemorrhaging Faith - James Penner & Asociates

Breakthrough!

In honor of Canada Water Week I’m posting some water-text observations from a song of hope and encouragement written for the Jewish community displaced in exile in ancient Babylon.

The year was 539 BCE and the long-cherished hopes of ever returning to Jerusalem were fading fast. Jewish children who had been born in exile were now grandparents. They were enslaved by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that fueled the agricultural economy of famous Babylon, an empire that oppressed its captive peoples with apparent impunity.

But God challenged that Babylonian sense of omnipotence. In Isaiah 44:27 God said, "I am the Lord who says to the watery deep ‘Dry up!’... and I will dry up your steams."

Or as another translation has it “When I speak to the rivers and say, ‘Dry up!’ they will be dry.”

This promise seemed like wishful hyperbole to the Babylonian exiles, but in October 539, the Persian army captured Babylon without a fight and Cyrus, the king of Persia brought in a new policy of religious tolerance and national restoration. He issued a proclamation allowing the Jewish captives to return home and re-build their ruined city.

God broke through the impossible barrier. Just as the Red Sea had dried up centuries earlier as the Hebrews escaped from Egypt, now the surprised exiles walked out of Mesopotamia with full imperial funding and support.

I remember a childhood song my Dad used to sing:

Got any rivers you think are un-crossable?
Got any mountains you can’t tunnel thru?
God specializes in things thought impossible
He does the things others cannot do.

As a kid I assumed this was a guaranteed “Get out of jail free” card.

I’ve learned that life doesn’t always work that way, but I’ve also seen God dry up pathways through wide rivers and reverse ‘impossible’ situations and bring about unexpected break-throughs in my life.

What break-through are you desperately praying for? What rivers are you hoping will open up to allow you to live life to the full?  The God who opens up unexpected paths through uncrossable frontiers is still in the business of being God. Trust him.

If you’ve ever experienced God bringing about a break-through in your life, share it in the comment box below.

I’ll have some more observations from this song in future posts this week.

Photo Credits:
Water Graphic - bonfirehealth
Euphrates River - Ferrell Jenkins
Imprisoned - Jerry Reynolds Photography

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

I love Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth - a powerful sad story of ambition run amok. Macbeth was a strong dynamic warrior who allowed others to draw him inch by inch into choices that destroyed his own soul. Deceit and fear
gradually became his signature.

As the tyrant Macbeth grew cynical and jaded about life he waxed wonderfully eloquent about the futility of it all -

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow!

What's the point of it all when you've lost your soul - or sold it for farthings?

Time creeps. Day-by-day we make choices that become a way of life.
And yet time flies - in no time at all, we hit milestone birthdays. Where did the days go? What did we trade them for?

This week my wife has been helping her parents move from the city where they've lived since they came to Canada thirty-nine years ago. Creepingly they acquired far more 'stuff'' than can fit in their new down-sized space. And yet it seems to them like just last year they emigrated.

Sorry, Macbeth, I beg to differ with some of your brilliant metaphors.
Life is a lot more substantial than a walking shadow - and a lot faster too.
I want to develop that assertion, but right now I have to run. Perhaps tomorrow . . . or the day after.

Candle Photo - Courtesy of Betitina Schuller

When Beauty Rocks Your World

Sometimes the world can be breath-takingly beautiful – as it was last night under a bright full moon. A silver halo, an unusual lunar corona, framed the moon over the waters of Lake Norman in North Carolina. Some days – and nights – the world feels like paradise itself.

But the news reminds me that others are digging out from fierce winter blizzards, that scud missiles are falling in Syrian neighborhoods, thugs attacked Christmas worshippers in Nigeria and the families of Newtown face a grief that can’t be spoken.

On Christmas Day Tiffany and I went with thousands of others to the opening of the new movie of Les Miserables. What an uplifting story of hope against

Souvenirs of Eden

Yesterday I went for my morning run with eyes wide open – and I found myself running amid bursts of glory.

Rimming the bank of our storm-water pond, the first splash of splendor was a stand of sumac, radiant with burnt-coral bronze leaves in the morning sun, seed-pods nutmeg-brown and bursting with plans for next year’s harvest.

The Caller's Spring

Samson was legendary, renown for exploits of incredible strength – killing a lion with his bare hands, slaughtering a thousand assailants with a donkey jawbone, ripping apart the city gates of his foes, and cracking apart the pillars of a pagan temple destroying his captors at their own victory party.

But the other day I discovered a different kind of Samson tale that had escaped my notice – even in my three years of researching biblical water stories.