Friend of the Earth?

When I was like ten I subscribed to Friends of the Earth magazine. I think it was cool at the time with my other little friends to read about endangered species. Those were maybe some of my first conversations that actually had a hint of seriousness about them and a small sense of justice rose up in me. I liked to look at the animals, I felt sorry for the ones that suffered and began to notice people’s bummer stickers, particularly the “save the manatee” ones.

I didn’t like my own dog though. Poppy (well maybe I liked Poppy because I was very young and much nicer to animals then), then Molly and then (and still) Pepper. If my dog even licked me once or jumped up on the couch with me, I’d push her off of me, make a wretched face even I wouldn’t want to see, and whinily call for mom to get that gross animal away from me. I still kind of feel the same way to be honest. Smelly, yucky, needy – no thanks. I also hated and despised every single insect that ruins my idealistic thoughts of living in the south. Those dreaded, crunchy, quick moving grasshoppers, cockroaches and beetles make me cringe and hug my nearly bug-free existence tighter here in the northwest. Even in my Friends of the Earth days I was all about extinction of the humidity-loving creepy crawling things. Ew.

My family recycled in three different containers. But we also threw away about half of our house every single week. Let’s just say my step-dad likes paper towels. A lot. If you asked him that deserted island question, I could answer for him right this second. Paper towels. No need to think about it. I can see him creating a paper towel bed right now on which he would sleep in a tightly spun paper towel cocoon, under a large palm tree and then napping happily. (Wait, he is the least resting person I know – so no nap, but he could make paper towel walking shoes as he scurries around collecting coconuts. That’s a more truthful image.) Growing up, he would spread out a paper towel under each of our place settings and fold up one under our forks and if I spilled my milk (quite the common occurance – such a clutz), he’d spin those suckers off the stand til he had twenty little clean up crew members to take care of my half cup mess. It’s a miracle we haven’t been held responsible for any landfill issues our city might have had. We certainly contributed more than the share of our block. :)

Sometime after those shallow rooted days of flipping through a kids environmental magazine, I not only didn’t care but got kind of bitter about it. I still recycled, but who didn’t. It was a habit, not a conviction. A behavior, not a heart issue. People annoyed me who talked about it. It felt more like a club they belonged to and felt like talking about it merited them respect and a higher standing. Maybe it was just the people I encountered so I’m not spreading a big blanket here, but pride kind of oozed out of these conversations. It wasn’t humble, it wasn’t pure-hearted – it just felt plain annoying and like they’d found an elite membership. You might as well have put a gold bricked club house around them and given them a martini to take on their walk out to the putting green. It felt just that snobby.

I also happen to have some other family members who are uber-opinionated about politics in general and who end up falling in the “I don’t believe any one or any party” category. So of course this influenced me as well. There were even little classes held in a relative’s house about why all the environmental push was a scam and a lie. So how can I escape that influence as well? No use going into the details and how I stand on everything discussed. I was young so all I can conclude at this point is the simple statement: Don’t believe the exaggerated propaganda. I still have a bit of that in me for certain. The skeptic was born, with a rushing and eager delivery.

So I stopped reading, stopped caring. Questioned most everything on the news or on posters, besides Jesus. Just recycled. And sometimes didn’t. And didn’t notice. Once you become a skeptic, even if you want to believe someone, you just can’t find it in yourself. Humanity isn’t truthful to you anymore. It’s hard to throw yourself on that identity of mankind.

So this also correlated with a time in my life around my late teens and early to mid twenties where I had strong convictions about certain other things. Things like wanting to read books by men and women I trusted in the faith. Things like learning how to be a part of a community of believers and how to love our neighbors. Things like how to not be defensive and judgmental as a Christian, but to learn how to love and be like Jesus even with people who completely disagree. Things like how to love a city that feels really dark and lost and lonely (Boone, NC and then Berkeley, CA). Things like seeing, really seeing, people who are all alone – some of them all alone from an obvious perspective and others all alone though they stand in those circles of people at all times. It was a time of faith. A time of letting my heart get burdened by a great God who loves people, his very creations made in his image. A time of learning a pinch of what it means to lose your life so that you can gain it. It was a season that had to come first. A season that got to the heart of the matter. And I certainly changed.

And graciously, God let me begin there. With the heart. With seeing Him. With seeing myself with both the light and the mirror he gave me for a gift those years. And with seeing other people, as Jesus did as he looked out on the crowds. It says in the gospel that he looked out on them with compassion. I feel like it took me about six years to look out on the crowds to even begin to form that compassion and burdened, shepherd heart. With lots of other immaturities and imperfections still permeating my lifestyle and behaviors and day to day choices, he graciously started there. At the heart of me and the heart of what he is most concerned about – his people of his very own, his most treasured of creations on earth…his children.

Then he slowly began to work on my weaker convictions. I don’t know how else to describe them. So though my heart was growing in the spirit and in my mindset and in my world view of people and community and life…there were very intangling roots in my physical life. I don’t mean my physical body, though I am not excluding that. I am talking about my good friends named laziness, selfishness, and ignorance in my day to day life.

It’s kind of like those people who give their whole lives to a big important world-shifting type job but then go home to an unkept, unsanitary house and eat out of take out containers. Something just doesn’t add up there in the healthy department. I wanted people to wake up each day to know God the way I was getting to known him, but somehow I could not get myself out of bed in the mornings and my snooze button was getting worn. I prayed for people to come to church with me, just to experience the Lord as I had, but I misused my own free time with distractions and selfish ambitions. I didn’t want people to waste their years on meaningless pursuits and empty idols of success and wealth, yet I had my own versions of waste with things like stewardship and money.

(I guess to some degree no matter how much we’ve grown or believe something, we are always hypocrites. And it’s just good to admit it upfront, that you’re not out to sell something because you’re the super star who got cured. But Jesus is all about making me like him and I just have to keep admitting that any change for the good in me isn’t my own righteousness or hard work – it’s been bought with a price and is a gracious gift. A gift that keeps springing up in me, so that I can’t even come full circle with this blog b/c it’s still coming round.)

So the Lord continued his work in my spirit, but began to connect my meaning of “spirituality” to my physical world. He wanted my head on the pillow to understand it was connected to my heart, to my devotion to him. He wanted my hands that commited themselves to distracted interests to understand that they were not my own, they were created for glory in how I served others. He wanted my feet that were set in a spacious place with lots of freedom to choose what to do, to understand that the Lord made me as an instrument of his righteousness, created to do good works. And lately he’s even showing me that the very ground I walk on is not just randomly existent under my feet - it is his land and he made it for us to live and move and have our being.

Do you remember doing those brainstorming webs for English class and you draw a circle with three main lines coming off of it and then off each main point you can draw a bunch of sub point ideas that connect or support? Well, off of this time in my life (the past five years of pregnancy and motherhood) I feel like you could draw like a trillion of those little shoots with things that the Lord has shown me about myself, what he has a heart for, what he’s growing in me, who He is, what he loves, etc. And one of those little lines is actually what I am getting at in this blog. But I could write a ton of shoots off this one, or maybe that’s what I have been doing all along (hmm…).

I mean to say in all of this that one tiny area of conviction, like how we feel about this place called home, called Earth, called our environment, called whatever you call it, can take years and years of building of conviction and belief around it. And I think that as someone who began at having no interest in such a topic so many years ago, finds it interesting that the Lord would make that area one of many such death-to-life building blocks. It’s one area for certain, that has surprised me, that he has said – Kelly, I care about this. You are my daughter and I have set you and my other children over all of what I have made. It is your home, it is your creation to enjoy and have dominion over and to protect. It is in your hands. Treasure it with your actions, enjoy it with your life, and use it to point to who I am.

(More to come on this topic…)