Green Acres?

I just love it that the media is all hyped up on living green.  The next sentence is always about consuming something new that's "green".  Look!  This family tore out their old, energy wasteful kitchen and replaced it with EVA/BPA-free, Energy Star, yammer-yammer, Gobbledy Gook, thereby reducing their cabon footprint to one inch!  Aren't they wonderful.

It's pretty typical that Americans can stick a huge house on a "green" acre and pat themselves on the back for consuming less.

A friend and I were talking recently about how christians consume at the same level as the world.  My daughter said yesterday about her play kitchen, "When this one dies, I'll just get this new one." Isn't her mother guilty of the same thoughts? All my favorite shirts are my new ones, etc.  Didn't someone say that we spend where our hearts lie?

I've been hearing more and more christians talk about living off the land.  Throwing off the fetters of the city to be self-sustaining.  Milking their own cows, farming their own grains, growing their own vegetables.  These are all noble, if a bit romantical ideas.

But there's a reason why most farmers are born to their vocation.

Tilling the ground is HARD, people!  We were made to work, yes, but, "cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."  The people I know who live off their land LOVE working the earth.  They LOVE growing things.  They get excited--heck, they get degrees to learn the earth better.  (Those of you who've read this blog know how I feel about gardening.)

And do we even indeed sustain ourselves? No, "I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them."

We are to look to our heavenly Father for our daily bread, and to thank him for that which we have.  I look around my house and...I have A LOT.  Yet, most times it's not enough.  I'm tempted and fail again and again to buy and buy and buy, and then what do I have?  A house full of stuff that's useful, but unused.

I've thought about these two ideas before: God's blessings to us, and the waste that being a consumer produces, but never put the two together until another friend was bemoaning her infant carseat which has been through 3 children now and is missing it's base. I can sympathize with that.  My infant carseat has been through 3 kids, too, and it's looking a little ragged.  Here's the amazing thing: her conclusion was, "but it's what God has given to us, and it's still useful!"

My mother-in-law is one of the greenest people I know in these terms.  I have seen this woman save smidgens of food left over, only to add them to some other little smidgens to make something truly impressive for dinner.  My favorite example of this was when we were packing up her mother-in-law's house.  Dinner rolls around, and we're thinking: take out.  But Beth, she goes in the pantry, finds a couple of cans of something, thows it all in a pot and out pops restaurant-worthy minestrone soup.  This saved us time, money, and trash costs (not a trivial thing in Seattle where the trash police comes and checks on how well you're recycling).  She doesn't think: What can I buy?  She thinks: What can I make with what I have?

Let's do the work that God has called us to do in the time that He has called us to do it, and try not to pretty up the edges.  I'll happily plan my vegetable garden, but I'm going to trust God to grow it, and try really, really hard not to get that kitschy aliens-carrying-off-the-garden-gnome statue.