Why I Hug Trees

I finished Serve God, Save the Planet today. I sat on the edge of "the hill" here in Cincinnati overlooking downtown. CCU has a nice little gazebo with a swing which was my vantage point and it offered a unique perspective as I read.

I won't say it was the best book I've ever read. I did thoroughly enjoy it but it awakened my understanding to something. Sitting there swinging, I realized I hug trees not because I necessarily give a rip about them or because I truly think we share the same mother. Sure, we come from the same Father, but it isn't really a spiritual issue to me in the way I might have expected.

The thing Sleeth does in the book is drive the thought of enviornmentalism back repeatedly to something I do give more than a rip about: missions. Though the reality that the fossil fuels I don't use acutally help my friends in the Sahara out, is the thought that what I do and don't do echoes back to materialism, greed, selfishness and a connectedness to the dark side of my only-childness: selfishness. I give a rip about the environment to care about others, because if I could get this under control, I could actually use that money to support actual things of value. I care about it because I think it sucks to be an average American. I hug trees because as much as I love an air conditioned stadium and a good game, as much as I love sitting in my family room and watching a great movie, I feel so much more alive in a park around nature, even if I am a mosquito magnet. (Sidelight, if you come see me in Cincinnati, I'll blow your mind with beauty and peace in some parks that even people who've lived here for years didn't know about).

The last few pages of the book summarize what I am not explaining well with one word. Love.
Love of God and nature and others create this cycle that affects so much of where I am at and frees me to care about things that matter and provide a life worth living.

Environmentalism, much like service and the poor, is a pretty popular i.e. cool subject right now. That sucks because it is on a course to be antiquated in a few years. It will go the way of all the other fads in Christianity.

A number of years ago I heard a sermon by Leonard Sweet. I find that if I read or listen to something he did about 3 years previously, it makes a lot more sense. He, like my friend Lowery, is too prophetic and sees things much earlier than the rest of us. Anyway, Sweet went through this sermon about all the things the church was too ashamed to admit or acknowledge that society has taken and championed and then the church has come back much like the punk playground kid saying something along the lines of "hey, that was mine first". Societies response? "Uh, when I found it, you'd left it laying in the gutter for the past few days so I figured you didn't care about it anymore."

What hacks me off isn't that we want back in on these ideas, its that we don't care about them until they become popular. If we would spend as much time "marketing" what God had written thousands of years ago instead of trying to chase down society and make it fit some verse, I think we might actually make a difference.

Okay, I'm done for now.