Continuing to Observe

Welcome to Keep the Ground. Keep the Ground is based on Genesis 2:15 where Adam is instructed to work the ground and keep it. It will look at our responsibilities to the earth and what can be done to preserve it.

As we continue through the month of March, we are continuing our look into what it means to observe, and how we should observe what is happening around us, and then take the time to consider how this impacts our lives, both for ourselves, and for those around us.

“Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.

Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” - Psalm 82:3-4

While this isn’t a command from the Lord regarding our duties and responsibilities towards the poor, it is a plea from someone who looks to the Lord for judgment and deliverance.

I believe that he has his positioning right when it comes to how we should treat the poor and the needy. Throughout scripture, we see the call to take care of the poor and the needy, we see the command to care for those who are downtrodden and cast aside by the rest of society.

Part of taking care of the environment is that we care not only for the status of the environment at the current moment, but we look ahead and look towards future generations. Part of caring for the weak and needy is providing opportunities with which they may grow. Caring for the environment therefore cares about the weak and the needy in times to come; using our time and resources at the moment to not only impact the ones around us now, but also to impact future generations.

As we look to the world around us, we see there are problems of all kinds that spring up whether we want them to or not. To just list a few of the problems around us, we have to deal with inflation, disease, hunger, thirst, and war. These only begin to scratch the surface of what issues we face as a people, but they are a sufficient list to begin the discussion of what it means to give justice and rescue the week and needy.

When it comes to inflation, there is no doubt that this hurts the poor the most. The poor are the ones who are just barely scraping by if they are able to do that, and then inflation comes along and makes it even more difficult for them to be able to afford the things that they need for survival. While it affects everyone except the ultra wealthy, it disproportionately affects the poor.

How can we help in this situation then since the governments of the world are going to continue to print money at unsustainable rates because it helps their own interests and makes the costs of their debts less expensive when you can just print money any time it is “needed” to help balance a budget? As we know, any time this happens, we are left with money that is worth less than it was before. The solutions are simple, we need to go back to trading or using a backed currency. We don’t like to think of changes like this happening because it along with other things threatens the way of the world and how we know it, but if we want to care for the poor, one of the ways we can do this is by making it easier for them to be able to afford the things they need and not cutting them off at the knees every time they try to save up enough money to get ahead in life.

The next thing we need to address is disease. We currently live in a time when we have the best healthcare systems to ever exist with the best access to equipment and various procedures, and yet we also live in the time with the highest ever levels of medical debt, and increasingly rising disease rates. How can it be that we can have these simultaneously? These can only coexist when healthcare no longer is truly about having the best end results for the patients, but rather lining the pockets of pharmaceutical companies. If we take a look at traditional medicines, there are natural ways that many of our common ailments can be treated with high success rates and low side effects, but there’s no money in giving people a nature prescription to go eat some herbs or berries, so these time tested methods are pushed to the side with statements that either claim that there are no scientific studies on such practices thereby making them seem unsafe, or the people who use these methods are made to sound as though they are less educated and thus shouldn’t be listened to.

Unfortunately, we have come to the point where if we want to understand our own health, we need to begin questioning the practice of the medical industry that continue to profit off of people’s illnesses. There are plenty of books available on the uses of different plants when it comes to medicine, so this would be a good place to start in starting to turn the tide against the major systems.

Hunger and thirst are other big things that we need to be concerned with. If we look around, it isn’t hard to see people who are struggling to have enough food to eat, or have access to clean water. These are something that we often take for granted because we always expect that the grocery store will have everything that we need, but just looking back a few years and we can be reminded of a time when the shelves in the grocery stores were empty, and people even in the United States didn’t know when the next truck of food would arrive.

At least in the United States, we have the access to grocery stores and we can know that for the most part there will be food of some variety available that we can eat. In other parts of the world though, people have to work to grow their own food in a hope that they will be able to grow enough to feed their family and hopefully have enough left over to be able to sell some and earn a small amount of money for their family. Then you have the people who don’t have access to clean water either because it’s too polluted to drink, or because it has dried up and is no longer available.

If we look at the rate that the environment is being degraded, it is no wonder that there are people who struggle to have enough to eat and drink. We as a society need to prioritize providing access to food and water to the people around us. For some this means having a hands on approach where you go to a different country to help the people learn better methods of farming or water retention, but for others, it just means minimizing the amount that we consume and thus minimizing the amount that we waste or even learning how to grow food on their own land to be able to have a level of safety were the economy to shut down again and food is difficult to access. When learning how to grow food, it is possible to use any excess that the Lord provides to be able to bless others with it either by giving it to a food bank, or offering it for sale so that people can eat food that was grown near them and build a community that isn’t reliant on government services to operate.

The last point I want to discuss is the presence of war. It seems like every time we turn around, there is a new war or a new conflict that is on the news. Often we think that this is something that won’t affect us, but the more we look at it, the more likely it seems that something could happen to us. War is an ugly beast that rears its head and leaves behind death and destruction. If we want to care for the world and the people in it, then we need to stop the senseless wars and the destruction that comes with them.

If we take the time to look at the world around us, it becomes clear that there are many ways that the world isn’t functioning the way that God would want it to. When we look through scripture, we see that God desires for us to be healthy, to have access to food and water, he wants to be our peace and our strong tower. Time and time again, we see that God is full of love for his children and he wants what’s best for them.

In my article above, I listed out a few of the ways that the world could look differently if we took the time to reflect on the blessings that God has given us and how we can be a blessing to those around us. It doesn’t always have to be a big change, but small mindset changes alongside of small changes in the day to day life can ultimately make a big impact.

This week as you go about your day, take a moment to consider how God is calling you to adjust your life and how your life can be used to give further glory to God.

Thank you for joining Keep the Ground.

May your labor be fruitful, and your land well-kept.

— Christopher