Here’s the Christmas letter we sent from Care of Creation to our mailing list recently.  If you would like to be on this list, click here to sign up, and check off any of the different newsletter’s you’d like to  receive (we mail about every six weeks or so).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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On this week of Christmas, I am very pleased to bring you greetings from all of us here at Care of Creation – from me and Susanna, from our staff and volunteers in Madison, from the Sorley family and our project staff in Kenya, and from the Ness family, preparing to launch our Tanzania project early in the new year.

Often at this time of year people ask me if I will be doing any traveling or speaking in December. Invariably my answer is, “No – people don’t want environmental talks during Christmas.”  Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining!  It’s nice to spend time closer to home.

On the other hand, Christmas can be a special time for thinking about God’s relationship to his earthly creation.  I touched on this several years ago in a chapter of my book, Our Father’s World, comparing Jesus’ incarnation with a hypothetical visit of a rock star to my own home:

This is how we need to think of Jesus, the Son of God, coming to earth.  We often think of his humiliation.  It is not a small thing for the all-powerful creator of the universe to adopt the form of a creature, but that is exactly what happened:

[Jesus,] being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross.  [Philippians 2:6-8]

Something else is just as important, though.  When he came down, he raised us up, and all of creation as well.  He lived here, in our house.  When he walked down the street and sat in the shade of a tree, his presence was honoring and exalting the dirt, the grass, the tree, the sky. If my daughter’s idol, the singer, had actually come to our house, the effect would have been purely imaginary.  Whatever fame and reputation this man has is purely ephemeral and is already fading.  He is no more worthy of praise and honor than I am – or than my daughter herself.  Not so with Jesus.  He made the dirt, the grass, the trees and the sky.  When he arrived, everything changed.

In the last chapter we saw creation as a temple – a cosmic worship space where a divine-human relationship can be pursued.  In Jesus we see God himself walking the aisles of that temple, not just standing behind the altar.  This is God as one of us: eating and drinking, laughing and playing, walking and talking, sleeping and working.  Before we heard God say that “it was good”; now we can see God himself enjoying creation.  It must be good, and it must be worth taking care of. [Our Father's World, chapter 3, IVP 2008]

There are a number of reasons we could list for why we do what we do, and you have probably heard many of them:  Tending the Garden was the first task God gave us to do; caring for creation means caring for people – it’s a true ‘pro-life issue’;  God’s redemptive plan culminates in the ‘reconciliation of all things to himself’ (Col 1:15-20).

But I like the Christmas reason as much as any:  Jesus, the Son of God, became part of Creation, and showed by his example and presence here that this is a special place and one to be valued and cared for.

And so, on this occasion when we pause to remember Jesus’ coming to earth as one of us, we thank you for your part in making our mission possible.  And we ask that you join us in recommitting to the great task of caring for this creation until the very day when Jesus returns to ‘make all things new!’

Blessings from our Care of Creation family to yours –

Ed and Susanna Brown;
Craig and Tracy Sorley with our Kenyan staff;
And Erik and Rachel Ness, bound for Tanzania.

Order Our Father’s World from our office or Amazon by clicking here;
send a donation to any of our staff or projects – or ‘buy trees for Kenya’ – by clicking here.

This summer Brittany Ederer, a student at UW-Madison, served as an intern in the Care of Creation office in Madison.  Based on her interest in camping, education nature and environment, we assigned her to start a survey project of Christian camps in Wisconsin, the upper Midwest and then throughout the country.  Are there Christian camps who are actively promoting creation care as part of their camp program?  Are they using creation care principles in caring for their properties?  This blog post is a preliminary report on a visit to one camp not far from Madison.  It turns out one of the best examples of creation care at camp is right in our own back yard.  We’re looking forward to a complete report from Brittany later on, but in the meantime, enjoy her thoughts on what’s going on at Timber-lee…

In mid-August I had the opportunity to visit Camp Timber-lee in East Troy, Wisconsin.  Timber-lee is an Evangelical Free camp that is busy year-round with summer camp, retreats, and school programs including Environmental Education.  I met with the Environmental Education Instructor/Animal Care Manager, Karen Good, and she showed me around their impressive Science Education Center.  My excitement turned to delight when I entered one of their several animal rooms and saw a myriad of snakes, turtles, and other herpetofauna  (look it up!).

While I held a beautiful orange and yellow kingsnake, Karen explained that many of their animals were adopted from rescues or donated to the camp.  The other room of animals was mostly mammals with a few birds, including a rescue squirrel that could not be released to the wild because he was raised by humans-and now thinks of himself as one too!

The rest of the tour included a spectacular “Seven Days of Creation” exhibit, classrooms with unparalleled insect collections and mounts of animals from around the world, a classroom all about energy and physics, a walk through some of their woods, and a stop at the marsh.

As I continued to chat with Karen, she explained how Timber-lee uses the resources they’ve been blessed with to teach summer camp kids and students alike.  I began to realize just how simple it could be to connect people with nature and help them develop a deep, Biblical appreciation and respect for the world God has placed us in.

Here are a few keys to the success of the environmental stewardship focus at Timber-lee:

• They introduce children to the animals in the Nature Center so they interact with living, breathing creatures that have specific habitat and diet needs.  In this way, the children can overcome trepidations they may have towards snakes, lizards, etc. while regaining an awe of nature.  It’s not always feasible to try and teach young ones about habitat destruction and the economic problems that accompany pollution, but if you can get them to care about the animals, then you’ve given them a reference point for being concerned about the environment as a whole.
• They use what they already have-for instance, they work on the section of forest they have to remove invasive species, they take advantage of the marsh shoreline to show and teach animal tracks, and use protected or endangered species already on the property to teach about conservation (like the kitten tail Besseya bullii, a threatened vascular plant in WI)
• They work with and take advantage of outside organizations, such as wildlife rehabilitation centers and conservation groups.  Numerous times rehabilitated wildlife is released on Timber-lee property because they maintain healthy native habitats.  They also have received grants from organizations like The Prairie Enthusiasts, which allows them to improve and expand their native prairie areas at camp.

This is a camp I would want my children to attend, because they’re doing it right!  The campers learn about what the outside world is like-what animals live where, how to identify their tracks, what a native ecosystem should look like.  It’s fun to learn!  Outside recreation should include more than wakeboarding or playing basketball, and can be as simple as learning about the trees around the campfire.  Also, creation care at Timber-lee isn’t just about how much money they can save or how many  “green” products they switch to, but about understanding a little better the heart of God.  Timber-lee has prayed and sought the face of God, and He has blessed them with many donations (like an insect collection) that they can use as teaching tools.

As I drove back to Madison, I reflected on a few questions:

• What would it look like for other camps across the USA to take their God-given resources to the next level?
• Many thousands of acres in this country are the property of Christian camps-how many of those acres are harboring invasive species, threatened or endangered species, or near-pristine habitat?
• How many camps are using what they have to actively engage their campers in environmental stewardship?

These are the types of questions I am trying to answer through my internship with Care of Creation, Inc.

Guest blog: by Lowell Bliss

As part of our summer vacation this year, we found ourselves at Canada’s Wonderland, a colossal amusement park near Toronto.  My teenage son has discovered roller coasters as a passion, and so we strapped ourselves into the Behemoth, riding up to a height of 230 feet and then plunging down at 77 mph.  The Behemoth cost $26 million to build.  But all day it was like that: we were surrounded by acres of ingenious and costly technologies engineered with the sole purpose to amuse and thrill.

As my old body began to wane in the late afternoon, I plopped down on a park bench and waited out my kids who were on another ride.   A young teenage girl was standing nearby.  Suddenly, I heard her utter a short squeak and I felt something rustling on the ground between my ankles.  I looked down.  A chubby woodchuck wandered out from under my bench.  Behind us was a small wooded lot between paths in the amusement park.  A little stream flowed into a pool there and it was hard to tell whether this patch of nature among the tarmac was original or manufactured.  Nonetheless, it was apparently where the woodchuck lived.  I suspect it was “suppertime,” if that’s what you can call his daily allotment of popcorn and funnel cake.

The woodchuck boldly walked out into the path of the crowd.  At first, people were as unsuspecting and jumpy as those of us at the bench, but soon the crowd, which had been moving from one multi-million dollar thrill ride to another, stopped and formed around the woodchuck.   This little creature had momentarily become the foremost attraction at Canada’s foremost amusement park.  Soon, young men who had apparently been unable to win a kewpie doll for their dates at the carnival games were demonstrating their manly prowess by petting the woodchuck and feeding it by hand.   I cringed.  I wanted to say something harsh to them.

The teenage girl next to me interrupted my self-righteousness.  “What kind of animal is that?” she asked me.

“A woodchuck,” I said.

I was surprised at the tenderness in my answer.  While I wanted to be pedantic with the crowd; with her, I had a longing to teach, in the best sense of that urge.  This was partly a wave of humility, since I was unsure whether there was any difference between a woodchuck and a groundhog and maybe if I should have called it a groundhog instead.  (I’ve subsequently learned that they are two names for the same rodent whose scientific name is Marmota monax.)  But mostly I felt sympathy for her.  Woodchucks might not be the most common of animals, but this girl didn’t know what they were.

“Did you ever hear the rhyme, ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck’?”  I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“That’s it.”

“Cool.”

I told this story last Sunday night when I spoke to a group of docents who volunteer at our local zoo.   I wanted to thank them for their service.  In a world of technological attractions, a simple woodchuck still has the power to draw a crowd.  I told the docents that our world needs animals.  We need zoos.  But as our world moves further and further away from Nature, we also need docents and interpreters.  We need them to share their knowledge about animals.  We need them to share their passion for animals.  We need to be tenderly re-taught about wild things, even to their very names.

And of course, this little event allows me to write another verse to Bob Dylan’s song Man Gave Names to All the Animals:

He saw an animal come from under a bench

It gave respite from the techno-stench

It waddled around with courage and pluck

“Ah, think I’ll call him woodchuck”

(. . . or is that, groundhog?)

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil and the publisher of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.  He is getting too old for roller coasters.

I’ve been pushing hard all summer on a major writing project with the goal of finishing the intial writing by the end of September.  This is the main reason you’ve seen less posts on Our Father’s World than usual.  Sorry about that – but hopefully the end product will be worth the wait.

In the meantime, enjoy this video clip from Chipotle.  You may know that I’m not much of a fast-food advocate – but this company does seem different.

Enjoy and pass it along!

John Stott’s going-home-to-glory was announced yesterday.  I wrote the piece below last September, but the thoughts are just as valid if not more so now.  If you haven’t read Uncle John’s farewell message to all of us, please do so.  There’s a link at the bottom of the post.

There are few leaders in the Christian world greater than John Stott.  I first heard him preach at Urbana 1970 – forty years ago, when I was a senior in high school.  [You can read the actual talks here - I don't think the recordings are available on-line.]  I’ve followed his ministry career ever since, though almost always from a distance – we shook hands perhaps twice or three times, but my memory fades a bit at this point.  John is now at the end of his life, though he has not yet ended his service to the church and her Lord.  He has written one last book that is intended to be his farewell to those of us still here – and you need to read it. 

I’ve known many leaders who ended their careers in scandal.  I’ve known a fair number now whose ministries were cut short by illness or death – they left us too soon and without warning, without the benefit of any last words of wisdom to carry us forward.  There have only been a few who, knowing they were leaving, took the time to share with us from that unique and precious place that is halfway between earth and heaven.  Those who have lived their lives well, and know they are about to leave for another, better place – they deserve to be listened to. If you had an opportunity right now to spend a few hours with John Stott, knowing he is at the end of his life, wouldn’t you do that?  So get this book…

Stott has called this last message The Radical Disciple: Some Neglected Aspects of Our Calling. Like all of his teaching, his thoughts are disarmingly simple, and unarguably biblical – and because of that, dangerous to read.  Having read, you can hardly say you didn’t understand what he was getting at.  And if you are someone – as I am – who wants to build his life on the Bible, Stott leaves you with precious little to defend yourself if, as probably will happen, it turns out that you have been neglecting some of these aspects of discipleship yourself.

So what are these neglected truths that are important enough to be this man’s farewell message to his sisters and brothers? Here are a few quotes from the first four out of a total of eight:

1. Non-conformity: The church has a double responsibility in relation to the world around us. On the one hand we are to live, serve and witness in the world. On the other hand we are to avoid becoming contaminated by the world, So we are neither to seek to preserve our holiness by escaping from the world nor to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the world. Escapism and conformism are thus both forbidden to us. (p 17)

2. Christlikeness:I remember vividly the major question that perplexed me (and my friends) as a young Christian. It was this: What is God’s purpose for his people? Granted we had been converted, but what next? …I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth. It is this: God wants his people to become like Christ, for Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God. [p 28-29]

3. Maturity: [Stott sees "growth without depth" as one of the greatest dangers the worldwide church faces today.  But what is this depth, or maturity?]  Paul’s most common way of defining Christians is to say that they are men and women “in Christ,” meaning not inside Christ as when our clothes are in a wardrobe or when tools are inside a chest, but rather as the branches are “in” the vine and our limbs are “in” the body, that is, united to Christ. So then, to be “in Christ” is to be personally, vitally, organically related to him. In this sense, to be mature is to have a mature relationship with Christ in which we worship, trust, love and obey him… [p 42]

4. Creation Care: [Surprised to find this listed alongside Christlikeness and spiritual maturity?]  The Bible tells us that in creation God established for human beings three fundamental relationships: first to himself, for he made them in his own image; second to each other, for the human race was plural from the beginning; and third, to the good earth and its creatures over which he set them. Moreover, all three relationships were skewed by the Fall. …It stands to reason therefore that God’s plan of restoration includes not only our reconciliation to God and to each other, but in some way the liberation of the groaning creation as well. [p 49-50]

That last happens to be the central theological pillar on which Care of Creation’s ministry is built – and fascinatingly his brief outline of three broken relationships (God, others, creation) restored by redemption is completely consistent with the  four relationships (God, self, others, creation) that I have made a key part of my own teaching and writing.  The fact that Stott has made it the first of his “application” truths reflects both his life – he has been one of the world’s most famous birders – and, I believe, his deep understanding of the wisdom of God and the word of God.

Creation care is not simply “one more nice thing to do”.  It is central to the message of the word and to the mission of the church, because it is a key part of God’s redemptive work in the world.

So let’s get to work.

[For completeness, the remaining four truths Stott expounds are Simplicity, Balance, Dependence and Death.  I won't take the time to develop those - you really do need to read this book!]

While it is hard to find a mainstream newspaper or magazine that does not have one, two or more stories on environmental topics these days.  Out “in the world” the crisis enveloping God’s creation is apparent and people are concerned.  Scanning the pages of Christian periodicals and journals yields the opposite result:  Little or no coverage of anything remotely environmental.  Which is why it is encouraging to find creation care appearing in two important magazines and journals in the last couple of weeks.  Read on and click through – they are both worth your time.

My colleague in Kenya, Craig Sorley, has an important paper in the latest issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.  The entire issue is devoted to the topic of Creation Care, including topics like Mission and the Care of Creation by Jonathan J. Bonk [HTML or PDF] and Historical Trends in Missions and Earth Care by Dana L. Robert [HTML or PDF].   [All these papers require free registration to read.]

Craig’s paper is titled Christ, Creation Stewardship, and Missions [HTML or PDF] and starts like this:

My Kenyan counterpart recently held a “God and Creation” workshop in a village called Mbau-ini, just a few kilometers from Rift Valley Academy and the Kijabe Medical Center, one of the largest mission complexes in the world. More than 150 missionaries live in the greater Kijabe area. The workshop that day focused on the acute problem of deforestation, and how Christians should be among the first to respond to such problems. Once carpeted by a lush cedar and African olive forest that fed streams out into the Rift Valley, many kilometers of the Kijabe escarpment now lie denuded of forest cover, and the streams have dried up. As my counterpart spoke with passion about the biblical foundations for creation stewardship and how we can honor Christ through caring for the environment, one member of the community, hearing this teaching for the first time, became obviously excited. With urgency he asked: “Why is it that for all these decades the missionaries right here have never told us that God was concerned about how we managed the forests? Why have they just watched this destruction taking place?”

Click through to read the rest of the piece.

At the opposite end of the academic spectrum, Christianity Today – too long silent on the topic of Creation Care, has been positively outdoing itself in the last few months.  Their latest issue features an important interview with evangelical statesman Eugene Peterson and A Rocha founder Peter Harris titled, appropriately The Joyful Environmentalists. conducted by Andy Crouch.  Peter is a colleague and friend with whom I have had frequent correspondence but have never met.  Peterson will be well known to many as a prolific author, most recently of The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible.

One sample question will give you a sense of what you’ll get reading the whole interview:

How do these themes connect with Americans, who mostly live in either suburban or urban environments?

Harris: That’s one distinction between a Christian take on creation and a secular romanticism about wilderness. Think about Psalm 104. In that psalm, which echoes Genesis, you don’t just have “the sea and everything in it”; you have ships on it, working. You don’t just have the land; you have people, working. There is a radical environmentalism that wishes people were not on the planet. That’s not the biblical view at all. A Rocha in the United Kingdom actually works in the most polluted, urban borough of the country, because creation isn’t absent just because people are there. The challenge is how to restore a right way of life, rather than escaping to some wilderness paradise. Fifty percent of the planet now lives in cities. That is where we live out our relationship with creation.

Other recent articles from Christianity Today:

Matthew Dickerson, Who Gets Left Behind? (a fascinating examination of the consequences of eschatological (end-times) points of view.)

via Flicker CC License - click for original

[This is part II of an extended post of observations gleaned during my current visit to Singapore.  See part I here.]

We left off with this statement: “this [Singaporean] miracle is more fragile than it appears.  It’s economic, ecological and political foundations are crumbling.  It would be surprising, to say the least, if the Singapore of 50 or 100 years from now was the same miraculous place it is today.”

Let’s unpack that a bit.

Singapore appeared on the world stage in the 19^th Century as an artifact of the expansion of the British Empire into South East Asia.  The geographical accident happens to be Singapore’s location on the southernmost tip of a peninsula that every trading ship from Europe had to pass to get to or from China, and as so often is the case, geography laid the foundation for a vibrant trading economy.  Singapore’s wealth grows out of one of features of modern capitalism:  Those who trade goods or services make more than those who produce them.  [True then, still true now, as evidenced by the wealth of those who “work” in the financial centers of the world but who essentially do nothing more than move imaginary wealth from one column to another day after day after day… but I digress…]

One of the apparent incongruities in the Singapore story is the coexistence of a free and vigorous economy with an extremely restrictive political system.  The infamous ban on chewing gum is only one example of a country that seems to be proving the dictum that people will put up with almost any restrictions as long as they are allowed to make (and keep) their money.  Whether the vigorous economy allows restrictive government policies to remain in place, or restrictive policies help sustain economic vitality through things like the suppression of dissent is an interesting but irrelevant question.  What seems clear, to my mind, is that the Singaporean political system imposes a discipline that has made it possible for millions of people to live on top of each other in relative harmony.  If there is little crime, little visible pollution and a city that functions well for almost all of its residents, it is probably because the government puts up with very little nonsense.  Call it the Cheaper By the Dozen syndrome:  The family with a dozen kids featured in that book learned to function smoothly, efficiently and happily – but only through the application of regimented discipline that would appall most modern families.  Singapore has become, and for the time being continues to be prosperous and relatively content because of the iron rod of political restrictions.

So here’s lesson #1 for the rest of us:  We can continue to increase human population in various parts of the world, as the Singaporeans have done, and still survive.  But if we want to achieve some level of social harmony and economic prosperity along with that, we’re almost certainly going to have to learn to live with the kind of political and governmental discipline that marks this society.  Anyone interested in World Government?  A world-wide Singaporean miracle would only be possible if that were the case. In spite of the  Cheaper By the Dozen example, not many of us really want that kind of restriction imposed on our lives.

Lesson #2:  It is impossible to run a country with the population density of Singapore in a way that will allow God’s creation to flourish.  It just can’t be done.  People here are flourishing, no question.  But birds aren’t.  Snakes aren’t.  Jungle cats aren’t.  Most of the creatures whom God originally put on this island have been banished.  If they are here at all now, it is probably in the local zoo.

Though this is a clean city with lots of trees and flowers, below the surface things aren’t quite as good as they appear to be, ecologically speaking.   Besides banning chewing gum, the government has also banned mosquitoes.  There is an ongoing, energetic eradication program to get rid of such ‘pests’.  This is tropical rainforest country.  And mosquitoes, besides being an annoyance, can be a serious health hazard for humans, bringing malaria and dengue fever.

And this may explain of the surprises of my current visit to this city:  There are far fewer birds here than I expected.  Lots of trees.  Tons of gorgeous flowers.  But in terms of raw numbers, there are less birds here than outside my window in Wisconsin.  I know the migrators will have left for the far north by now – but in an area of tropical rainforest, there should be plenty of year round residents.  What’s going on?  Here’s what I think:  When you ban mosquitoes, you probably eliminate other insects as well.  And when the insects are gone, there is not much left for birds to eat.  So our tropical paradise is pollution-free (relatively) and still beautiful, but it has no birds.  There’s something sad – even tragic – about that picture.  [NOTE:  I would love to be corrected on this by someone with more direct scientific knowledge of the ornithological situation in Singapore.]

But what’s wrong with that?  The birds are presumably still okay outside the city limits.  Maybe?  Here’s my problem.  If we think we’re going to try to do a Singapore all over the world, we can say goodbye to the birds everywhere.  There will be no ‘outside the city limits’ any more.

This represents a fundamental disobedience to God. Before God told us human beings to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ he gave the same command to the creatures:

God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”  (Gen 1:22)

When he gave us ‘dominion’ over the creatures, he was asking us to help the creatures to obey his commands to them, one of which was to ‘be fruitful and increase in number…’   When our increasing, as in Singapore, results in their decreasing, we have a problem.  We’re sinning.

Finally, lesson #3: The  Singapore miracle is not only not replicable; it’s not sustainable.  In fact, I’ll go further and suggest that it’s just about over.  You would never know by looking at the skyline, or by wandering through the shopping malls, but this economic miracle has almost run its course, keeping in mind that ‘almost’ is a deliberately elastic term.

How do I know?  Take only one curious news item from a couple of years ago having to do with one of the most common substances on earth, sand:

“LOOKING for sea-sand for reclamation project in Singapore. Prompt reply is greatly appreciated.” Many such pleas can be found on Alibaba.com, a popular Chinese trading-website. Malaysia banned sand exports as long ago as 1997. Indonesia followed suit in 2007 on environmental and, some say, political grounds. Ever since, it has become harder for Singapore to secure supplies for its booming construction industry and sea-fill plans. (Economist)

That report was from 2009; the worldwide economic slowdown and adjustments in various markets has meant that there is still sand available for construction here. But it’s a warning:  There is no such thing as an infinite supply of anything.  Sand is just one of many thousands of commodities that have to keep flowing if Singapore is to keep growing.  This economical/environmental miracle by importing vast amounts of everything, which essentially means exporting the ecological problems those substances represent, whether the environmental damage caused by sand extraction or deforestation caused by the need for wood.  As other countries develop, and need more of the stuff that Singapore has been buying from them, or become more aware of and concerned about environmental problems in their own back yards, Singapore will be left to fend for itself.  Being a quintessential capitalist country, when Singapore stops growing, she dies.

So where does that leave us?

There might be ways to manage extremely high human populations in ways that allow for both abundant ecological and economic wealth.  Singapore is not the answer.  What is wanted is a new approach, starting, maybe, with God rather than economics?

via Flickr CC License - click for original

My wife Susanna and I are in the middle of a two week visit to Singapore.  This is an unusually long and delightfully leisurely visit compared with most of my overseas trips.  Because our youngest daughter lives and works here, we’ve come to see and experience her world as well as to share the creation care message in two conferences this week – which is why I’ve been able to experience and explore the city in a more relaxed manner than is usually possible.  These are some of my impressions after five days here – anecdotal, to be sure, but still valuable, I think.

In many ways, this island city-state is everybody’s dream location.  Certainly this is true for those whose lives involve overseas postings, whether they are from the government, corporation or nonprofit worlds.  People native to the region as well line up for work permits and jobs, and the wealth of the citizenry is legendary.  At a dinner two nights ago a Singaporean friend commented:  “A fundraiser that in Australia would net $300 would get $50,000 in Singapore – in one afternoon.”

Built on the tip of the Malay peninsula, the rainforest has been replaced by some of the most modern architecture in the world.  Gadgetry is ubiquitous, from phones and Ipads to high tech expressways with electronic toll systems that are activated only during periods of high congestion.  A superb mass transit system moves thousands of commuters from home to work and back with high efficiency and relatively low cost.  Most people live in high rise apartment complexes because of sheer population density, but even here crime is almost unheard of.  In the city that long ago banned chewing gum, it almost goes without saying that the cleanliness of the streets would make your mother proud.

There is a significant gap between rich and poor, as there is everywhere.  BMWs and Porsches share the highways with motorbikes and pickups filled with day-laborers  on their way home from a day of hard work in hot and humid weather.  These workers are on their way to tiny rooms which, though a far cry from the slums of Manila or Karachi, are certainly less comfortable than where I sit right now.  But still the people come, or try to, from every country in the region.  For many, Singapore at its worst is a paradise compared to the options they have at home.

As the world’s population continues to rise toward a peak of 8 to 12 billion or more within the next generation, Singapore seems to be the perfect example of how to handle lots of people while maintaining a high standard for quality of life.  With an astounding 18,235 people per sq mile, this is the most densely populated country in the world.  Given that a large percentage of the center of the island is reserved for water catchment, the practical density may well be double the posted figure.

Surely this is evidence that people like Cal Beisner and Wayne Grudem are right?

“Long term trends show that human beings will be able to live on the earth enjoying ever-increasing prosperity, and never exhausting its resources.”  Politics According to the Bible, p. 332 (see Living on a Finite Planet)

Beisner and Grudem could point to Singapore and argue that this isn’t even theory – Singapore has done it and there’s no reason the rest of us can’t follow their example.  [This point of view is known as Cornucopianism  - here’s some background information.]

Well, maybe.

Or maybe not.

It doesn’t take long for an observer to realize that the Singaporean miracle has grown out of a combination of unusual geography, a fortuitous if hard-working economy, and strait-jacket political policies that are among the most restrictive in the democratic world.  There can be only one Singapore.   And it would be safe to add that as amazing as it is, this miracle is more fragile than it appears.  It’s economic, ecological and political foundations are crumbling.  It would be surprising, to say the least, if the Singapore of 50 or 100 years from now was the same miraculous place it is today.

More on that in our next post.

Floods in Kentucky - Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

Care of Creation, my organization, does a lot of work teaching people in Kenya and other East African countries about the dangers of destroying forests.  God gave us trees for good reason:  In terms of hydrology (water cycles), trees are essential.  They are like the columns holding up the roof of a building – lose the trees, the whole system falls apart.  It turns out that something very similar is going on in the Mississippi River watershed of middle America.  We’re a richer country – but it appears that mere wealth can’t stop a flood.  When we human beings carelessly destroy vital parts of the world God gave us to live in, it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re living in a village in Kenya or on a farm in Missouri.

Lost in the blizzard of headlines over the last week – tornadoes, weddings, the death of a terrorist – is the developing  flood situation in the Mississippi River valley.  The few stories that we’ve seen have focused on what one commentator called a solomonic dilemma:  Whether to save a small, struggling riverside city (Cairo, Illinois) or hundreds of thousands of acres of the country’s best farmland in Missouri.  That case has been all the way to the US Supreme Court in the last 48 hours, with the result that last night the Corps blasted two miles of levees at Bird’s Point, just south of Cairo in order to reduce the pressure on that community’s flood defenses.  As of this writing, the river has receded by a foot – the Corps hopes that they’ll see three more feet of decline in the next couple of days.

Of course, that’s only one city, and the Gulf of Mexico is a long way away.  Look for a lot more excitement on ‘Old Man River’ before it’s over:  This may take a month or more to play out.  But to give you a taste of what’s to come, here are some of the headlines today from Google News (search on ‘Mississippi River Flooding’):

Ohio River Sets New Record, Mississippi Waters Still Rising

Bloomberg - Brian K. Sullivan – ‎4 hours ago‎

The 6- to 10-day outlook from Commodity Weather Group LLC calls for below-normal rain in the southern US, including the Mississippi River valley. “These areas will be drier over the next 10 days, helping to ease the severity of flooding a bit for …

Isle of Capri Casino Hotel in Lula closed due to Miss. River flooding

Today’s THV - Amanda Terrebonne – ‎15 hours ago‎

(KTHV) — The Isle of Capri Casino Hotel announced Monday that as of 3 am central time on Tuesday, May 3, the casino will be closed temporarily until flood waters recede. “As the Mississippi River continues to rise access to our property has been …

Water reaches Tiptonville

State Gazette - ‎4 hours ago‎

Lake County, as well as other counties, is also experiencing rising water levels, both from the Mississippi river and rainwater. Lake County Mayor Macie Roberson stated the northern part of Tiptonville has begun flooding and almost 50 residences have …

As an aside, that last story may be the most important one in the list.  I’ve never heard of Tiptonville (it’s in western Kentucky), nor Lake County, nor Mayor Roberson.  Nor have you (unless this blog has a bigger reach than I expect).    But Tiptonville is a special place for all of the folks who live there, and who are heading into their own slow-motion version of what the tornado victims across the south experienced last week.   We measure disasters with numbers, but the reality is that every disaster is a collection of hundreds, thousands of individual human stories.  It’s people who will suffer in all of these events.

So what’s to be done?  There is not much you can do about tornadoes or earthquakes.  While there are suspicions that a warmer world may lead to more and stronger tornadoes, it appears that the link between climate change and tornadic activity isn’t there yet.   Like earthquakes, tornadoes are part of God’s world – we’ve got to learn to live with them.

Floods are a bit different.  In most places, the natural world doesn’t have drip irrigation.  Our water is delivered in batches.  When it rains, there will almost always be more than we need for the moment – sometimes so much more that we have a flood.  And then it will be dry, sometimes for a very long time.  In this sense, floods are part of the system by which the natural world runs.  And in fact, throughout most of history, floods would have been welcomed as nature’s way of restoring depleted soil with a fresh new layer of silt.

Care of Creation’s project area in Kenya comes to mind as an example of how a normal hydrological system should work.  In this region of East Africa, farmers have long counted on two rainy periods in the year:  The “long rains” come about now and last for six weeks or so.  The “short rains” come in November.  In between, hardly a drop falls from the sky.  In normal years, in normal times, this wasn’t a problem.  God’s creation and human beings had all adapted to this rainfall pattern:  During the brief, intense rainy periods,  the mountain forests acted like sponges, soaking up the rain when it came, and gradually releasing it into streams and rivers over the entire dry season.  Many mountain streams would flow year round, even during the months with no rain.

This system has been severely disrupted – almost destroyed – in East Africa.  Vast stretches of forest have been removed for firewood, charcoal, or to make room for farmland, and the result has been completely predictable:  Erratic rainfall (made worse by global climate change), floods when it does rain, contributing to massive erosion, and then droughts when it doesn’t.  I have personally stood with Kenyans who showed me a dry stream bed that used to flow year round when they were children.  The important lesson:  It is not God who dried up the streams.

We have a tendency to lecture people in countries like Kenya about how dangerous it can be to destroy the natural systems God has provided.  I give some of these talks myself.  Such lectures aren’t misplaced.  People in these countries tend to live closer to the edge than do those in, say, middle America, and when your country’s water supply is fragile anyway, destroying the forests that provide that supply is not ever a good idea.

All of this makes the following Google News entry quite interesting:

Mississippi Floods Can Be Restrained With Natural Defenses

NatGeo News Watch (blog) - Sandra Postel – ‎4 hours ago‎

As riverboat casinos close along the lower Mississippi River as a precaution against disastrous flooding, another form of river gambling is coming under the spotlight — the bet that levees will be able to safeguard cities and farms from the rising …

Take a minute and click through to read the story.  It turns out that here in the US we are doing with our natural wetlands what Kenyans have been doing with their forests:

Over the last three-quarters of a century, while engineers were building hundreds of miles of flood-control structures along the river’s banks, the water-holding wetlands in the Mississippi watershed were being drained and filled to make room for more farms and homes. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have each lost more than 85 percent of their wetlands.  Minnesota, where the Mississippi originates, has lost a whopping 9.3 million acres of wetlands, 62 percent of its pre-industrial total. All together, eight states of the upper Mississippi basin have lost 35 million acres of wetlands, an area the size of Illinois.

Those wetlands worked like a giant sponge: they absorbed rainwater and then released it slowly to nearby streams or the groundwater below. In this way, they mitigated floods and made the job of levees that much easier. But with these natural protections largely gone, levees have been left to do all the work.

So… we could say, with the Kenyan ladies of the cartoon, ‘God, why have you let these floods destroy our homes (again)?’ while looking out at acres of mall parking lots where wetlands used to be.  I think we’d get the same answer.

It’s not God’s fault.

It would appear that when we “pave paradise to put up a parking lot”, there are consequences.

Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan?

Let’s start by experiencing the disaster just a little bit.  The clip below is one of the first live reports of the wall of water and debris engulfing the flat land bordering the sea in Miyagi Prefecture north of Tokyo.  I don’t expect you to watch all 18 minutes, but take it at least through the first four or five, remembering that every house, every vehicle being swallowed has people in it.

[Click here to go the clip - embedding has been disabled.]

My first reaction to this is that Hollywood’s disaster flicks don’t come close to duplicating the real thing.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything even in fiction like this monster as it races across the landscape, belching smoke and flame, swallowing everything in its path.  My second response is similar to how I feel when I stand at the base of Niagara Falls – very small and inconsequential.   Look – everything human is being obliterated.  Our greatest works hardly slow it down; instead, as human artifacts are swallowed they become part of the monster, swelling its size and increasing its power to destroy.  There is powerful metaphor here – read on.

This 20 minute disaster by itself is enough for a lifetime.   But this is only the middle act of a three-part tragedy.  To this we have to add, on the front end, approximately three minutes of the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history, and on the back end a still unfolding nuclear disaster whose effects could last from decades to centuries.

Now would you like the really bad news? This is happening in Japan.

This is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world.  Japan is not only the source of many of our cars and electronic gadgets – she is the most prepared-for-disaster country in history.  Japan knows earthquakes as Oklahoma knows tornadoes.  Building codes are possibly the strictest in the world.  Public education, early warning systems, disaster drills:  Everything that could be done in anticipation of a disaster was being done.  There is no way to blame this tragedy on greed (the Gulf oil spill), poverty (Haiti), or political ineptness (Hurricane Katrina).  No – it seems like this is one tragic event that was going to happen and there was nothing anyone anywhere could have done to prevent it or to adequately prepare for it.

An article in the New York Times on disaster preparedness sums up the situation nicely:  No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature bats last.

[Note for international readers: That last phrase comes from the American sport of baseball, in which teams have to take turns at bat, the only time a team can score runs.  The home team always bats last and therefore always has the last opportunity to win the game.   In the great game of life on earth, we human beings are the visiting team, and nature will always have the last say.]

So let’s get back to the original question:  In this situation, where the best that human society can offer is less than inadequate, how should we pray?

First, we need to put God back into the picture. “Nature” is a euphemism – God is the reality.  Nature does not control the movement of tectonic plates, the displacement of billions of tons of sea water.  But God does.  Isaiah 40 might be a useful chapter to run to in these times of trouble and chaos:

²¹ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
²³ He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
²⁴ No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

Does putting God at the center of the Japan disaster make you a bit uncomfortable?  It should.  “Fear God” is a common exhortation in the Bible for good reason – over familiarity with the God of earthquakes and tsunamis is not a good idea.

This leads directly to our second item:

We need to understand our frailty and adopt an attitude of humility. There’s a line I use often in my talks that applies here:

“The entire human enterprise depends on two things: Six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

No matter how clever our inventions, no matter how beautiful our artwork, no matter how profound our works of literature or how powerful our weapons or how vast our (imaginary) wealth, we are in the end biological creatures who suffer and die quickly without air, food and water.  Our frailty is evident in every disaster – water and food become matters of top priority, and lack of these is often a major reason for breakdowns in security and social norms.  But absent a disaster, we human beings act like teenagers who are invincible and will live forever.  Could there be a better description of an economic system built on the premise that perpetual growth is possible, desirable and inevitable?

Perhaps James’ caution could apply here:

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.

And we need to admit the reality of our sin and repent. Think back to the image of the tsunami wave racing across the landscape, engulfing cars and buildings and then carrying them along, adding them to itself and using them to consume and destroy yet more cars and buildings.  There is a powerful metaphor here:  All of our economic, political and social structures have been built, like the Tower of Babel on a foundation of arrogance and greed.  We have in fact “added house to house until there is no more room and we live alone in the land” (Is 5).  We have “destroyed the earth” and unknowingly lived on the blood of millions trapped in poverty.   And the system we’ve built for our comfort and prosperity is in the process of destroying us, more slowly but just as effectively as that tsunami wave whose destructive force was magnified by the cars and houses it had swallowed.  (See previous posts that relate here and here and here and here.)

Biblical repentance calls for a change of attitude as well as change of direction.  “Go and sin no more,” says Jesus to an admitted sinner.  Can an entire global society learn to “sin no more”?  I’m not sure we can, but I suspect this is the great challenge of our time.

And this brings us to our one hope in all of this:

We can appeal to the mercy and grace of a God who is not only wrathful but also loving:

¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:13-14]

And while we confess and pray, we can also hang on tight to the words of Jeremiah at one of the darkest periods of Israel’s history that are the source of one of our greatest hymns of prayer and praise:

⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
²² Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³ They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”   [Lamentations 3:19-24]

And so I turn from visions of disaster and tragedy to think again of the warbler I saw this weekend, who has survived a long, hard  winter and a flight of thousands of miles, and who spends his morning singing praises to his creator, and mine:

Is it a warbler?  Let me know…