I wasn’t trying to be green…I was just living out my faith.

The “green” movement still bemuses me. It’s a bandwagon that shouldn’t have been jumped on “en masse” by Christians, simply because Al Gore and Brian McLaren and various Hollywood stars manufactured the issue of the decade. Rather, it should have been a way of life for God’s people, from Adam forward. Stewardship is an injunction consistent with Christianity.

We should conserve, because it pleases God, not because Sheryl Crow makes a music video guilting us into using 2 sheets of toilet paper.  Sheryl’s show has the opposite effect.  It makes me want to fling toilet paper into the potty like an unsupervised two year old.  (Don’t worry.  I don’t.  I’m too frugal.)

As God’s people, we should be frugal when it comes to wasting resources. When it comes to love and care and nurture, we should be extravagent. We should set the course, be the example, for the rest of the world. We should do this without legislation, without being forced. (It is interesting to me that often it is those who most loudly proclaim that the government should not legislate what people do in their bedrooms are those who want the government to jump in and give us all sorts of laws and regulations about the environment. “Because it’s really important” is their explanation – as if morality is not.)

For me, I’ve always been what I would call “crunchy.” I’m not willing to be called “green,” because of the associations. I advocate stewardship, loving care and conservation – NOT the elevation of the rare tree frog above the American infant in the womb. (And truly, the rare animal/insect/amphibian species is more protected than a pre-born human infant. It is recently cool in Christianity to clean up a marsh for a yellow-striped swamp turtle but NOT COOL to work at a crisis pregnancy center. Abortion is SO yesterday in our radar.)

I was raised crunchy, although we didn’t know it. We just thought we were doing what good stewards did. My husband and children and I are still crunchy – although we thought we were just being frugal. The two go hand in hand, you know. Most often, IF NOT LEGISLATED, the most “green” choice is also the cheapest.

Some examples:

• We do not use chemicals on our lawn. We like dandelions. We also don’t water our lawn. If there’s a lack of rainfall, we have a brown lawn. So be it.
• Cloth napkins. We couldn’t stand to throw away paper napkins, meal after meal, day after day. We added up the cost, and couldn’t believe how much money we were literally throwing away. Cloth napkins work better, don’t fall apart on messy spaghetti faces.
• Turn off lights, turn the heat down at night. Saves money, saves resources. I just don’t want the government dictating to me what lightbulb I must use. “Free country,” my eye.
• Shop second hand, when possible. Less fossil fuels used to produce new items, less waste going to landfills.
• Garden, when possible. We thought everyone did this. How else do people feed their families? How do they entertain their children in the summer? Organic gardening…just for the cost of the sweat of the brow. It doesn’t get better than that.
• “Eating local” is the newest phrase. Again, we just thought everyone did this. It makes sense. If you garden, eating local is a no-brainer. You can’t get more local than your back yard.
• We require short showers, because we’ve felt the pinch of high water bills. We’ve got 3 children in the range of teen-hood, and simply can’t afford for each to have 20 minute spa sessions in the shower each morning. We ask them to turn on the water to get wet, then turn it off. They lather up, then turn the water back on to rinse. Once again, frugality equals convervation which equals stewardship.
• There are many more ways we live out our faith in manners consistent with Christian stewardship, but this gets you started…

In many ways, we have been naive to think that because we lived this way the rest of the Christian world lived in like manner. We recently spent a weekend with a young family with two small children. (They do not read the blog, and even upon torture I will not divulge their names.) They were a young, two career family on the fast track to even better careers with money to burn and both children in full-time day care. It was eye-opening to visually verify that a family of ten who are fiscally conservative can live more environmentally frugal than a family of four. Non-sustainable products flew into the trash with regularity. Water poured from the faucets like there was no limit. Excess ruled. Neither stewardship nor frugality were considered. These things take time, and they were short on time. (This is an assessment, not a judgement. They are beautiful people and we love them. It was just surprising, and caused us to see that not all Christians choose stewardship.) Because of stewardship, which is a biblical concept, our family of ten is able to live on less income AND spend more time together AND carry less debt than a family of four with differing priorities.  So much for the old “you shouldn’t have a large family because they consume too many resources” argument.  Well-raised children will grow up to be good stewards, and they will produce much more than they will consume.  They will return more to the earth than they take.

Living a life of stewardship is consistent with Christianity.  It is consistent with a good, rewarding and satisfying life.  God initiated it, way back in the beginning, and we would do well to live out our faith in like manner.