Part of aging is the habit of looking back over one’s life while musing upon present reality and circumstances while asking the question, ‘Why am I what I am today? What and who has influenced me to have the interests and motivation to do the things I do?’ “Creation care” began for me at a very young age with a mother who continually ‘immersed’ my senses in the world around me in a small town called Fair Oaks in northwest Pennsylvania. From observing sunsets to turning over rocks in the creek she always had something in nature to point out. Our home was a living menagerie of different specie of reptiles, amphibians, birds and critters from the ‘crick’. The kids in the neighborhood knew me as the ‘nature boy’, and every spring I was the elementary science teacher’s resource for providing frog eggs so that we could watch the amazing transformation from tadpole to frog.
As I entered high school in the late sixties my interest in nature translated easily to a concern for the environment in the fledging movement that led to the first Earth Day in April of 1970. I adopted a personal project in my small hometown of cleaning up a tributary to the Big Sewickley Creek which eventually fed into the Ohio River. In writing to state representatives and others I believed would be interested in helping and
I received overwhelming support and encouragement from those I contacted. I somehow came to the attention of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and they came out to interview me and took my picture near the stream which came out in the Sunday paper, and because of this “celebrity status” I was chosen to attend a conference on ecology in Somerset, Pennsylvania with the high school biology teacher.
My activism continued when we organized a modest recycling center in a local shopping center on the first Earth Day and had a good response from local residents to the effort. Next came the gathering of signatures to stop the SST jet from getting off the ground because of the exhaust and noise pollution associated with it. I worked in the dietary kitchen of the local hospital and was drafted to write an article on ecology once a month in their employee newsletter.
There was a major piece of the puzzle missing this whole time which was not put into place until my second year in the Army, and that was the Person of the Creator. Henry David Thoreau was my favorite natural philosopher because he reflected in writing and life what our generation was awaking to – the abuse of the web of life by man, and a response to it which in Thoreau’s case was civil disobedience and withdrawal, themes that found much fermentation in many of us during the sixties. I loved the ‘wall plaque’ quote from Thoreau…If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him keep step with the music that he hears however measured or far away. What kept nagging at me was the pointlessness of it all if we were what many of the songs of the times were saying congruently with our science and history teachers, that we were a product of impersonal matter plus a lot of time plus chance, and that in this vast universe we were but dust in the wind. So what was the use? Though actively concerned for environmental issues I labored under the angst of hopelessness as we traveled on the good ship Earth to nowhere.
I experienced the first Earth Day in 1970, and in April of 1974 I experienced my first Heaven Day when the Lord Jesus Christ regenerated my heart and revealed Himself to me through the Bible. The puzzle was solved and now I had substantive reason to care for the environment. It belonged to Christ and He had made me one of His stewards to care for it. This went far beyond mere love of nature, it was love for the One who made it. In harmony with Romans chapter 1 I found that by acknowledging first the Creator I was able to continue my efforts in environmental issues without making the mistake of so many sensitive people in the ecology movement of worshipping and serving the creature in the place of the Creator.
This brings me to the point of writing this article. My love for and concern for nature has been enhanced since my conversion to Christ rather that diminished. As I walk the country roads of the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland where I reside I gather up trash along the way because this is my Father’s world. As I observe nature I can now lift my heart to the One who made it in grateful adoration. As a pastor I am also convinced that the church has much work to catch up on in the area of environmental awareness and stewardship which is directly connected to the covenant of redemption. But the greatest impact that we can have on influencing the next generation must come from the homes of God’s people. It begins at a very young age when parents spend time with their children walking on paths through the woods, wading in ponds and creeks, laying on the cool grass in the summer and looking at clouds and stars all the while reminding them of the majestic scriptures that speak of the God of nature such as Psalm 19, 65, 104, or Job 38-41. I hope that each parent will realize how profound an impact you can make on your children in the area of covenantal stewardship of our Father’s world.