God is HUGE

Last night, during our Way to Live session on Prayer, we entered into an imaginative prayer exercise together.  In that time, we reflected on just how big, how vast, how incredibly awesome God must be.  And then we heard the words of Scripture from the Apostle Paul: You are the dwelling place of God!  You are where God hangs out and lives.  Do you believe that?  Can you imagine God choosing to live within you?  What an amazing gift!  It’s hard to believe, but that’s just what the Bible teaches us.

To really think about the vastness of God, I showed a video clip from the beginning of the movie Contact.  This scene takes us from a position above the Earth and pans out from there to take in a view of….well, the whole universe!  Think about the fact that God created all this: billions of stars in our galaxy alone, billions of galaxies in the whole universe – and the God who made it all is a God who cares for each of us.  God is HUGE!

 

Thinking about Work: What is the “Way to Live”?

Two Sundays ago, our Way to Live topic was Work.  Work is a natural part of life, as basic as the effort to hunt or grow our own food if we didn’t have our many  modern conveniences.  If we want to develop good skills for a sport, then it takes the work of frequent practice.  Sometimes we need to “work at” keeping connected with friends.  And, of course, God calls us to do “good work” in his name for others.  Work is a good thing in that it challenges us, reminds us of our limitations, allows us to make things different or create something new.

But a lot of the time, perhaps most of the time, when we think of the word “work” we think of what adults do during their day – your parents  in their offices or yours truly typing this blog post at the computer keyboard.  Work is what has to get done to pay the bills and put food on the table…not to mention the Xbox in the living room.  Some people go overboard and become obsessed with work – “workaholics.”  But for most of us, we also try to have something we call “life” that is in some way separate from “work.”  Work is our duty, what we have to do, while life is what we choose.  Some of us find work that we integrate with “life” and work becomes part of who we are.  Others absolutely cannot wait for 5:00 to come.

There’s often a struggle to find what is called the “work-life balance,” a healthy mixture of personal time and one’s job.  A common question that is asked in search of this balance is, “Do I live in order to work or do I work in order to live?”  We hope that our answer is the latter – we work so that we can obtain what we need to have a secure and enjoyable life.

I think it’s interesting to compare how much someone is “supposed” to work today with how often people were at work in the past.  Today, in America and in similar countries, a “normal” full-time job is forty hours each week.  As recently as the beginning of the last century, however, many Americans were working much more each week – about 70 hours or more.  But in the Middle Ages and earlier, the average person may have actually worked less than the average person does today.  And the earliest humans, whose “work” was mainly hunting and gathering food, may have only spent about 18 hours each week working – that’s less than one full day!

This makes me think of some questions to think about as we try to figure out whether we live to work or work to live.  For example:

• How much work each week do you think would be too much?
• How much would be too little so that someone could deserve to be called “lazy”?
• Would you rather work longer hours for more money but less time to make use of it, or shorter hours for less money but more time to yourself?
• How could we as Christians help each other figure out the place of work in the right Way to Live?

This also brings to my mind the story of the Christian community in San Francisco called the Church of the Sojourners.  This is a church of people who actually live together and share things in common (a similar attitude to what we see in Acts 2).  Because they share a lot of their resources, many of them work only part-time jobs so they can spend more time with the community, or in prayer, or simply enjoying the day God has made.  They’ve decided that while they may have less money than most people, they’ve reached a better quality of life.  What do you think?  Would you work for more or live with less?

 

Way to Live: Resources for Creation Care

This past Sunday we talked about God’s creation and how the Bible may call us to practice what some have started calling “creation care.”  This is environmental concern the Christian way – understanding ourselves both as creatures within the boundaries and connections of nature as well as God’s greatest creation, made in His image.  We are given some authority over this world but we must use our authority like God uses His with us – that we would be loving, kind, respectful of all the life that surrounds us, and that we would seek cooperation with ou natural surroundings instead of separation or opposition.

With that in mind, here are some resources to get you thinking about, and acting, your own care of creation.

How Big is Your Footprint?

A few web sites feature interactive quiz games that reveal the size of your “ecological footprint.”  This “footprint” tells you how many Earths we would need if everyone on the planet lived the way you do.  The different games measure different aspects, so try each one and see what scores you get!

The Global Footprint Network calculator shows that my current “way to live” requires 17.4 acres of land and, if everyone lived like me, 3.9 Earths!  And I was being generous to myself with some of my answers…yikes…

Myfootprint.org makes me look even worse!  With some of my answers, I said some things that I plan to be doing in the near future…but even then, I result in 4.36 Earths!

Finally, the most visually interesting game (and the one where I come off looking best) is Consumer Consequences.  But hard as I may try, when all is said and done, my lifestyle would require three and a half Earths!  And no matter how much you manipulate the answers, I think it’s actually impossible to get anywhere close to just one Earth.  That’s because more needs to be done besides our individual choices – even if we’re the “greenest” house on the block, we will always depend on the structures and resources of our society as a whole.  Creation care needs to be both a personal choice and a choice made by our community, state, and country.

Easy Ways to Change Your Lifestyle

There may be some things your family already does that you can build upon.  Maybe you already recycle at Person Industries.  Maybe  your parents have started a garden so you can grow some of your own vegetables, fruits and herbs (instead of getting food that, on average, has traveled 1500 miles from the farm to your dinner plate).  Here are some other small changes you can make:

1. Buy local and organic foods – If your food comes from Person County and the surrounding area, and if it is grown “organically” (using natural methods instead of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides), then you get food that is fresh, delicious, and that is brought to you in a process that uses a lot less oil or gasoline that cause global warming.  You and your parents can visit places right here in Roxboro, such as the Farmer’s Market at the corner of Foushee and Depot, Riley’s Produce on N. Main Street, and Lee Farms Market on Madison Boulevard.  The major grocery stores like Lowe’s, Food Lion, and even Wal-Mart have some organic foods, although they will often not be local.

2. Get away from that TV and that computer! – Okay, so finish reading this post, then turn off the computer!  Spend less of your time with activities that require electricity.  Spend more time reading (I hear that Bible’s a pretty good book), playing outside, or taking up a new hobby.

3. Read about creating a different “Way to Live” – There are a couple of books you can easily get your hands on that will provide lots of information and give you specific things to do.  In our very own Youth Library in the basement, you can check out It’s Easy Being Green: One Student’s Guide to Serving God and Saving the Planet by Emma Sleeth.  She wrote the book when she was fifteen!

On Sunday I also showed the high school students the book The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit by Stephen and Rebekah Hren.  This couple built their first self-sufficient home right here in Person County.  They have since moved back to Durham and they remodeled an existing, 70-year old house.  Thanks to their garden they grow half their food, and thanks to their solar panels and energy efficiency they don’t need any electricity from the power company.  While you and your parents may not be that ambitious, the book is full with a whole range of ideas, easy to complex, on how to make your house more creation-friendly!  This book is available through the public library system.  It’s not at the Person County library, but you can look it up with the search page and request that it be sent over here for you to check out.

4. Get active! – Get involved locally with issues of creation care.  You can join or organize a club at your school.  Ask your principal, local businesses – even Roxboro Baptist Church! – what they are doing to be better caretakers of our local environment.  Volunteer with the North Carolina chapter of the Nature Conservancy or join the work of Person County PRIDE.

5. Learn more about how all this has to do with the Bible – With the high school students, we held a simulated debate about whether the Bible said we could pollute all we wanted and it didn’t matter, or if our lack of care for creation could be sinful.  While most of us may now think God wants us to care for creation, Christians haven’t always thought the Bible says that creation is important to God.  But the Bible may be more “green” than people believed!  Consider taking a look at the The Green Bible or some Christian books on care of creation, such as Serve God, Save the Planet by Matthew Sleeth (Emma Sleeth’s dad) or Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation by Ben Lowe (available in March)

I hope all these resources will be helpful to you as you figure out how to make creation care a part of your Way to Live!  Next week we’ll be talking about a related practice: Stuff

 

Way to Live: Visit the web site

As we go forward with our journey together through the Way to Live, I invite you to visit the web site (www.waytolive.org) and take a look at some of the teenagers’ stories found there.  This coming Sunday our theme for discussion will be “The Story.”  See you then!