Not for Long
I’m not Green; I don’t worship Mother Earth.
The earth is only the mother of my flesh, the part of me I keep having to kill every day. I’m not too attached to it.
That doesn’t keep me from caring about the environment. There is a tension in a genuine follower of Jesus which stretches out a hand to leave this world, but reaches out to heal as much suffering as possible with the other hand. I’m not going to trash this world, but I’m not going to worry overmuch about keeping it pure and unstained according to some blind vision such as is common to Greens.
It was prophesied this whole mess has an endpoint. It’s approaching, and no human can calculate the time. God knows, but His calculus is utterly beyond anything we would recognize. It’s His property. He can do what He wants with it, and none of us is in a position to question that. He won’t allow it to die until He’s finished with it. Reading between the lines of His Word, we sense He is proving a point to an audience we cannot comprehend, but we are the center ring in the circus. It’s not so much a question of when the earth is done, but when we are done, when He is done with us. Something about our existence here is the main issue.
Because I care about that issue, and I care about the lives of those who must share this world with me, and those who come after me, I do what I can to keep it tolerable. I write and share my understanding, but I also try to leave stuff in the most useful condition possible. Some of my polluting is the result of too many things I can’t control, choices I don’t have. In order to be faithful, there are certain things I have to do. Not in the sense of accomplishment, but in obedience. If it’s in my hands, I’ll use it for His glory. I’ll make mistakes, but my mission is to keep trying. So the balance point between trashing this trashy existence versus keeping it useful to others is trying to keep an honest accounting with God.
Yeah, it matters if we pollute, but there are limits to what we can do without sinning the other direction.
