kar0ling

Sharing God's love with all creation. It's the motto of Christian conservation organization A Rocha. At first, it seems like jarringly liberal rhetoric. Is saving the whales really as important as stopping child prostitution? But taking a step back, I realize that there's nothing so very out of line about it. Why shouldn't God love all creation? He made it -- lovingly, intricately, with great beauty. He says that if we won't praise him as is his due, the rocks will cry out to do it for him. God loves all his creation, for all of it was made to worship him. And when relationship was broken -- by humans -- it was broken not only for us, but for creation as well. So our mission of reconciliation includes not only our fellow humans, but the physical world in which we live.

A wise coworker recently shared this insight she has gained over the years: contrary to our wishes, God doesn't have a sense of obligation to report back to us. When we do anything good -- are involved in a ministry, perform a random act of kindness, play the Good Samaritan, or just follow through in obedience on an impulse we feel is from the Lord -- we secretly want some kind of confirmation that we've done the right thing. We want to see the fruit of our work. We're results-oriented, conditioned to value efficiency as a high goal, thus, we gotta know what happened . God doesn't often oblige. He's not concerned with being accountable to his shareholders. I'm increasingly seeing that being a follower of Jesus means learning to embrace mystery; to accept the beauty, intricacy, and wisdom of the magical unknowns, not in a complacent lazy acceptance, but in a life-giving surrender to a power that is above our own, and a wisdom that far transcends the working of ou...

I've been wondering lately if choice isn't becoming our ruin. As Westerners, we're under this delusion that we get to choose. We have freedom of choice, we assert. We get to vote. We can choose brand names, products, stores, cable packages, payment plans. Oh, the choices! And more. We get to choose who we marry. (And having chosen, unchoose when things don't work out as planned.) We get to choose when we have children, and whether, and maybe even who they are -- or, perhaps more accurately, who they are not. And now we want to choose when we die. But do we really get to choose? Are we really in control of all this? I'm not arguing for some overly-deterministic, fatalistic perspective on life, only for a dose of reality. There's a saying that you can't choose your family but you can choose your friends. But can you honestly say you've chosen each of your friends? You fall in with a group of people, or are thrown together with a group of people, and rela...