Creation Care, Part 1

Dear Church Family, Friends, and Guests,

There's so much going on in the world that vies for our attention, focus, and energy. It's a constant battle to focus on anything for any length of time. Worry, and the tyranny of the urgent move us into actions that are reactive, not proactive. The ideals of groundedness—home, time to be, to think, to live—are increasingly distant for many of us. So it’s possible that Earth Day came and went this week without your notice. And if it did, it's like "Grandparents Day" or some other sort of recognition that gets buried in the slew of recognitions. It's kind of related to the idea that when everyone wins a prize, there is no prize, nothing that means anything. 

And yet the greatest threat to humanity at this very moment is climate change. Fluctuating seasons and varied oddities in weather patterns have become routine. And the temps keep creeping up! Regrettably, we have a government that's abandoned conservation and greenhouse gas emissions controls in grand fashion. We're already past the 360 parts per million that Bill McKibben wrote of as the tilting point. It's so overwhelming, we might ask what the point might be? Rising gas prices, food prices, electric bills combined with lower paying, harder to get jobs and rising unemployment along with wars that create crises where there were none are harbingers of economic and ecological collapse.  

So what's to be done? What's the role of the Adventist Christian in 2026? What can we do in Hollywood? 

Let's let the Lord of all Creation and the Redeemer and lover of our world speak. Let's listen. Let's partner in this space to be keepers of creation, and let's care for our earth—whatever the big picture might be. We can't control global affairs... but we can tend our garden.

Grace and Peace,

Pr Greg