(RNS) — Is anyone else tired of being told to use less, waste less and shrink your footprint in a society that seems increasingly built to create more trash?
Christians have been taught to think of creation care primarily in terms of reduction, especially reducing our waste. I get why. We look around and see garbage everywhere. But what if creation care looks more like bending our lives back into patterns that mirror and support the cycles of creation as God designed them?
My wife and I have three daughters, and we used to dump all our uneaten food into the trash. It felt wrong, but we made a simple shift that changed everything.
Our leftover food now goes to our chickens. They will eat it, lay eggs for us and feed the compost pile. The compost pile helps produce vegetables in our garden, which will, in turn, produce more meals and more leftovers so the cycle continues. Now, nobody has to finish what’s on their plate. When you’re full, you’re full.
This system we implemented at home sits in contrast to the industrial systems that shape the way we interact with the world, which have mostly flattened the miraculous cycles of divine abundance into linear conveyor belts of consumption. If we want to get rid of that waste, we have to begin bending those straight industrial lines back into circles, so that “waste” is cycled back into God’s economy of living systems.
Wendell Berry, a Christian farmer and writer, puts it aptly in his 1977 “The Unsettling of America”:
“[Machine derived] energy goes in as ‘fuel’ and comes out as ‘waste.’ This principle sustains a highly simplified economy having only two functions: production and consumption. The moral order appropriate to the use of biological energy, on the other hand, requires the addition of a third term: production, consumption, and return.”
God didn’t design humans to manage the speed at which the world wastes away. God designed humans to co-sustain living cycles that turn what looks like waste into the raw material of new life.
Of course, not everybody has space for chickens. Not everybody knows how to make compost. I didn’t.
When I was fresh out of college with a music degree and no money, I had just moved into a tiny apartment of my own and I could barely afford rent, let alone food. I did have a sliver of brick patio, overgrown with weeds. One day, I pulled up bricks and put seeds in the ground: corn, watermelon, kale, lettuce, beans and tomatoes. My friends thought I was weird. I didn’t even think it would work. But when the corn tendrils first spiraled out of the soil, it felt like a miracle.
My watermelons grew from buds to the size of basketballs. My tomatoes climbed up over the pathway and onto my roof. My home became a verdant little paradise. At a time of my life when I felt like I had nothing, God gave me more than enough. I could cook and share God’s abundance with my neighbors.
(Photo by Helena Lopes/Pexels/Creative Commons)
Everyone has access to that kind of joy. Everyone can bend their lives just a little bit more back into patterns that mirror God’s design in creation. When you do, you might get to know your Creator in a new way.
In the “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” John Calvin writes that God governs creation “not by producing a kind of general motion in the machine of the globe as well as in each of its parts, but by a special providence sustaining, cherishing, superintending, all the things which he has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow.”
God did not set the world in motion and forget it. Romans 8 says that as we anticipate Jesus’ return to finally free creation from the bonds of decay, the Spirit urges you and me to begin living in that reality now.
Maybe the first step is to choose one way you can close a loop in your own life. Grow a seed in a pot on your windowsill and watch something dead come to life. Turn some food scraps into compost and hold billions of microorganisms in your palm. Walk through a green space and let God fill your lungs with the same oxygen that filled Abraham and Jesus.
Caring for creation isn’t primarily about reducing our waste or impact on the planet. Honoring and tending to creation is a way that we partner with God so that our world overflows with life.
(Brendan McClenahan is the church engagement manager for Plant With Purpose and creator of the Tend initiative. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)