Ways to Engage in March

I like to make things, and one of my most recent hobbies/side hustle/past time is making macrame wall hangings. I love macrame because all it takes is a couple of pieces of rope, tying a few knots, and suddenly you’re left with a beautiful piece of art. Imagine the scenario in which I spent hours creating a macrame wall hanging, gave it as a gift to a friend, and later finding out that they mistook it for a rug. Instead of hanging it as a centrepiece on the wall of their living room as intended, it spent its days wiping dirt, sand, water, and dog **** off of people’s shoes. Day in and day out taking a beating when it was created to be cherished, displayed, and admired. I think this image is often similar to how we treat God’s work of art: the earth.

In Matthew 22 Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God with all that we are. Psalm 24 declares that the earth is God’s, and everything in it because it was God who created it. Putting these together, it seems that loving God includes caring for the things that God has made. We would display the art that our friends, children, or loved ones give us, so this month we ask whether we have understood God’s work of art as something to be cherished, displayed, and admired, or if it has become something we wipe our feet on.

As we get our hands dirty this month (literally and figuratively), we aim to re:assemble a view of creation care that consists of more than the 3Rs (though these are important!!), but a robust understanding of our weighty responsibility as “stewards” of God’s planet, and how that radically changes the way we live in it (Gen. 2:15).