Doesn’t time fly when you are having fun? It’s usually the case that stuff we have been looking forward to such as a day off or a holiday can take a long time to get here and then when it does eventually arrive it seems to be gone in a flash. For me the season of Christmas is a bit like that. I have said before that it is my favourite of all of the seasons of the year and this last one, like those before it, seemed to take forever to get here and then just a couple of weeks ago at Candlemass there it was gone again for another year.
Such is life I suppose and we should live in the present without worrying too much about what we have left behind or indeed what lies ahead; In fact Jesus tells us in the gospel according to Matthew “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough cares of its own”
Difficult though isn’t it? Living in the present always will to a large extent be conditioned by what has gone before and living in the here and now can indeed affect the future; for instance unless we as a race begin to heed the warning signs and begin to take seriously our responsibility to look after God’s creation; which includes all living things, all that we see around us, then the world will not be fit for purpose for future generations, it really is as stark as that.
The scriptures are full of messages about human beings having dominion over God’s creation and if we ignore this responsibility then we do so foolishly and dangerously. We cannot help but notice that environmentalists are being quite vocal about the damage we humans are doing to the planet we inhabit and quite rightly so. Programs such as The Blue Planet have drawn our attention to both the beauty of creation and the reckless way that humanity abuses it. But we don’t just need to listen to David Attenborough showing us pictures of far flung exotic places: I was sat waiting to enter a roundabout to join a motorway just the other day and felt sickened at the refuse that had clearly been thrown out of car windows and left to pollute the environment… our environment!
Collectively we humans can do much to challenge and change the mindset of those who think it ok to abuse this world that we inhabit and we must do so to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation for the benefit of us, for future generations and for the life of this amazing planet that we call home.
Time does indeed pass very quickly: we have just said goodbye to Christmas once again and are looking Lent in the eyes: Please don’t forget our Ash Wednesday Service 7:30pm on 6th March by the way, and of Course Lent is about taking stuff on rather than giving stuff up. Can I make a suggestion for Lent please? Can I encourage you to think about what you can do to help the environment: It needn’t be about big grand gestures or self-sacrifice but rather about how we dispose of things, how we re-cycle. How we challenge over packaging, how we educate those who don’t give any thought to the harm they are doing when dropping their litter. God gave us dominion over His creation; we need to take that seriously for the sake of the future of our planet: Let’s be happy stewards of the planet we inhabit!
Rev Peter The Vicar
(This article was originally published as part of St David’s Messenger March 2019)