God’s nature advocacy: The application by people of faith of their talents toward Earth stewardship.

Just as we serve God in discipleship, caring for the poor and afflicted, pastoring, singing, cooking for the congregation, volunteering in church projects, supporting youth, and the myriad other ways that God has made possible for us to express his spirit, so is caring for the Earth, on which we and other species depend, a rich application of the talents (wisdom, caring, thinking, writing, speaking, using our time and ourselves for the conservation of his nature) that God has blessed us with.

Many times have had crises (plague killing one-third of Europe’s population during the Middle Ages, the evils of the Inquisition, World Wars I and II that devastated peoples and nations, and through much of history, slavery); “Times that,” as Thomas Paine said, “try men’s souls.”

Our challenges–mass extinction plus the climate emergency–are bigger than the preceding crises because they threaten all species, and we’re thick into them. You and I are making informed (in our science-informed, twenty-first century we’re well aware that mass extinction and the climate crisis are marching on) moral choices when we choose our leaders, policies, and personal actions. We Americans, who have been the biggest contributors historically to greenhouse gases during this industrial age, are at a pivotal point in human history. If we elect leaders who don’t support aggressive climate action and who don’t support the conservation of habitat and species, then we will continue our descent into an accelerating chaos of drought, floods, strong storms, heat waves, rising oceans and forced mass migrations—in other words, a self-created apocalypse.

Yes, we have inflation, the stock market is down, and the supply chain slowdown consequent to COVID has not fully returned to normal—but these things too will pass. A heated-up Earth and collapsed ecosystem will not pass during the brief sliver of Earth time that God has allotted us (so far) to show who we are. For our purposes, we’re making our forever future now.

What good is personal faith if it’s not applied to helping others?—and the biggest help during our time is to reverse the mass extinction and the climate emergency that threatens all species. As someone said, “There are other times, but these are ours,” and advocacy for God’s nature is sorely needed now.

⸺ MRM

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
     — Martin Luther King Jr

“The critical issue is not what we know but what we do with what we know.”
     — Admiral Hyman Rickover (father of America’s nuclear Navy)

“Faith by itself, if is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
     — James 2:17