{"id":1978,"date":"2022-09-19T07:25:58","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T11:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2022-09-19T07:25:58","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T11:25:58","slug":"taking-care-of-gods-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/09\/19\/taking-care-of-gods-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Care of God’s House"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.

In 2008, three former college schoolmates living in San Francisco came up with a novel idea.
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Since hotel accommodations in the Bay Area were both hard to find and exceedingly expensive, they devised a website that would help out-of-towners locate short-term living quarters and breakfast \u2013 essentially, an opportunity for guests to crash in someone else\u2019s house for a few days. \u00a0They called it AirBed&Breakfast, later renamed Airbnb.\u00a0
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The company took off.\u00a0 Customers love the comparatively affordable and spacious quarters.\u00a0 Homeowners appreciate the chance to earn some money just by giving someone else the keys to their front door.
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Plenty of things can go wrong, of course.\u00a0 Sometimes the host drops the ball.\u00a0 At other times the guests misbehave.\u00a0
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Incidents that fall into the latter category can be pretty amazing.\u00a0 Some Airbnb customers seem to forget where they are.\u00a0 They\u2019re living for a few days in somebody else\u2019s house.\u00a0 They\u2019re cooking in that person\u2019s kitchen, sleeping in their bed, and changing channels with their remote.\u00a0 The host family\u2019s pictures adorn the walls.\u00a0 Everywhere you look, there are reminders that somebody else owns this place.\u00a0 Yet a handful of guests come to the strange conclusion that they are free to invite strangers into the house and party down.
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One Airbnb customer decided to pay off his expenses by re-renting the house for a third party\u2019s wedding.\u00a0 Another decided to operate a brothel.\u00a0 One guest family resolved that they simply wouldn\u2019t leave when their time was up, claiming that 30 days of occupancy gave them ownership.\u00a0 A host returned to find peanut butter coating almost every interior surface of his house.\u00a0 Yet another drove up to find that his house had burned to the ground.\u00a0
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Living on somebody else\u2019s property helps us grasp something of what it means to cultivate an attitude of global stewardship.
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We all live in God\u2019s house.\u00a0 This is not our<\/em> place.\u00a0 This is his<\/em> place.\u00a0 Everywhere we look, we see reminders of him<\/em>.\u00a0 God specially created this world as a wonderful place for us to occupy for a limited time.\u00a0
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And we have not been granted permission to trash the place.\u00a0
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That idea was routinely dismissed in the preaching and teaching of the 19th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 As the Industrial Revolution rapidly mechanized both farms and factories in Europe and North America, people tended to think of Nature as little more than raw material \u2013 an endless resource to be plundered at will.\u00a0
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An almost militaristic attitude prevailed.\u00a0 It was humanity\u2019s destiny to conquer the mountains, tame the rivers, clear the forests, and defeat wild beasts.\u00a0 The supporting Bible text was Genesis 1:28, where God commands Adam and Eve, \u201cBe fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.\u201d\u00a0
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According to \u201cdominion theology,\u201d humanity is free to conquer and use every other living thing.
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Within the last century, however, a far healthier perspective has come into view.\u00a0 It springs from a second Genesis text: \u201cThe Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it\u201d (2:15).\u00a0 \u00a0Alternative translations declare that Adam should \u201cguard,\u201d \u201ckeep,\u201d and \u201ctend\u201d the garden.\u00a0 Those are the verbs of stewardship.\u00a0
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Creation is far more than a supply depot for raw materials.\u00a0 It is a one-of-a-kind treasure that glorifies God.\u00a0 Every time we experience the beauty and diversity of what God has made, we see him<\/em>.\u00a0
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People of faith are finally beginning to apply the word \u201csin\u201d to humanity\u2019s misuse of God\u2019s world, and are acknowledging the virtue of preserving his stunning natural works.\u00a0
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Without falling into the trap of Left vs. Right or \u201cmy environmentalism is more pure than your environmentalism,\u201d is there anything that all of us can rally around?
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A great place to start are six words that begin with the prefix \u201cRe-.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0
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We can all Reduce, Reuse<\/strong><\/em>, and Recycle<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 These are not controversial matters.\u00a0 These are not political issues.\u00a0 These are practical ways that we can live more wisely as people whose first aim is not to please ourselves, but to please God.
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Then come Repent, Rethink<\/strong><\/em>, and Rejoice<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 As the Bible\u2019s account of Noah\u2019s Ark makes clear, God has made a covenant not just with people, but with all living things.\u00a0 We cannot remain spectators to the destruction of what God has made, just because we don\u2019t know what to do.\u00a0
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The problems are huge and the issues involved are complicated, not to mention controversial.\u00a0 We may feel very small in the face of them.\u00a0
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But God is very large, and our prayers and actions will set into motion changes that are beyond our ability to imagine.
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We all get to live in God\u2019s amazing house.\u00a0
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May we be the kind of guests who leave the premises better than we found them.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here. In 2008, three former college schoolmates living in San Francisco came up with a novel idea.\u00a0Since hotel accommodations in the Bay Area were both hard to find and exceedingly expensive, they devised a website that would help out-of-towners locate short-term living quarters and breakfast \u2013 essentially, an opportunity for guests to… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[503,456,504],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ecology","tag-nature","tag-stewardship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1980,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/1980"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}