Baby Steps toward a Better Earth

In his helpful book, Serve God-Save the Planet, J. Matthew Sleeth makes the following comment:

"God's beautiful earth will not be saved by words or good intentions. It will be saved by humble, anonymous acts like turning off the lights..."

At Wild Hope, we’re taking steps in our attempts toward better stewardship of the earth. While we can’t stop the terrible environmental degradation going on in all corners of the globe, we can begin by taking baby steps of our own that lead to better Creation care.

In our household, some of our baby steps include the following...

We’ve changed several highly used light bulbs for energy saving ones. We plan to change more.

We turn off lights. If we’re going to be out of the room for more than 60 seconds, we hit the switch on our way out. We don’t light up rooms we aren’t in.

We turn off fans in the morning, and often turn the fans to a lower setting once the kids are asleep in their rooms at night.

We often do one load of laundry at night because there is less machinery running in these hours while businesses are closed and this reduces drain on the system.

We don’t have a dryer but hang our clothes in the African sun.

We’ve stopped buying liquid hand soap because we can’t justify all those plastic bottles any more. We’re back to old fashioned bar soap at our sinks ☺

We’ve stopped flushing the toilet every single time it is used. Closing the lid, we save all those liters of water for flushing after the second or third time.

We encourage our visitors to bring their own water bottles when they come to Africa and we fill them from our filters because we don’t want to add more plastic to the environment.

We carry our own bags to the shops and the market.

We reduce our meat consumption because we know that it takes more resources to raise meat than it does to raise vegetables, grain and legumes.

None of these things that we’ve listed require huge transition or dramatic lifestlye changes from us. They are not particularly impressive or noteworthy. They are baby steps and they remind us that we have a part to play in healing the earth. Romans 8 says that Creation is groaning and waiting for the sons of men. We are just taking steps to ease her pain.

How about you? What has your family found that you can do together to care for this wonderful world we share?