It all started back when I was a young girl growing up in the backwoods of Montana. I remember spending long summer days exploring the foothills near my house, where I considered the meadowlark and the deer my best friends, and where I learned to fit into the perfect space within the delicate balance around me…
Wait, wait, wait. I don’t know who that is, but it’s not me. I mean, that sounds nice, but I grew up in a suburb of Madison, WI. Sure, I had a backyard that I played in; there was grass, a few trees, and a couple squirrels and rabbits that would chase each other around from time to time. But my best friends were certainly not the deer or meadowlarks. Or the squirrels, for that matter. (Although one did somehow sneak into our house once, so perhaps you could say we were more than acquaintances…) The point is that I didn’t grow up in conditions that one might think of as particularly conducive to producing a person who could be considered an environmentalist.
I did, however, grow up in a home where our faith in Christ directed the way we lived. The importance of having a relationship with God, learning to listen to his voice throughout the day, talking to him about my joys and struggles, and trusting him with my needs and desires were all things that I knew were important, even from a very young age. However, I cannot say that I always prioritized this relationship. I, like many who are exposed to religious practices from a young age, went through a period of questioning and rebelling against all the things that I was told were “good” for me. It took some pretty painful wake-up calls (yes, more than one) for me to realize that the road I was leading myself down actually wasn’t where I wanted to be going. So finally, during the spring of my second year of college, after several months of waffling about whether the God who created not only me, but the entire universe, was worthy of my piddley little life, I got on my knees and gave it up.
Ok, so that’s great, but why am I writing a blog about being a Christian environmentalist? What does that even mean? Christian? Environmentalist? In the same sentence?? Aren’t they two separate issues? Well, I guess those are the questions that I want to wrestle with here.
Oddly, at about the same time that I began intentionally getting to know God and learning to live my life with and for him, I also began to develop a newfound interest in the environment and the effects that our decisions, big and small, have on it. At the end of that semester, almost on a whim, I decided that I was going to change my major from chemical engineering to environmental science. And I did. Although these two changes in direction (my faith and my studies) felt, at the time, independent of each other, in retrospect I think they may actually be very connected.
I then began discovering the implications that both of these seemingly unrelated decisions have for the way I live my life. When I first heard about Restoring Eden, I was intrigued that there were people working on behalf of the environment explicitly as Christians. This was a new concept to me. But somehow, God orchestrated things perfectly so that I landed a job with Restoring Eden, and through this experience He has been reconciling in my mind and heart the disconnect that I felt between “environmentalism” and “Christianity.” I feel challenged to openly explore this apparent discontinuity that I, and many others, have felt and even still feel, but also to discover the beautiful harmony that is produced when love of Jesus and love of his breath-taking world unite.
I am not the expert by any means, so I hope along the way you will find an opportunity to join in this conversation with your own questions, insights, and ponderings, and by the grace of God we can navigate together and celebrate this long awaited reunion.
Photo courtesy of Alexis Illyn
A Christian...Environmentalist? 