Tracts and Articles
Apostacy
Divine Love
Come See My Zeal for the LORD!
Faith
Holiness
Mark of the Beast
Materialism
Danger of Increasing Riches-Wesley
Through the Eye of a Needle- The Doctrine of Nonaccumulation
Practical issues
Enjoyment of the Pleasures of the Present Life- Letter of John Newton
Prayer
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood...
Revival
Salvation
While I am up here
on the stump I might as well stay up here for this article. If you have followed this column, you have probably noticed that I tend to switch from the theoretical to the practical and back again. It is a healthy way to go through life: look at the principle, then put it into gear in a tangible form. After you have it rolling along, you step back again to make sure that you are going where you really intended to, not just going somewhere.Some folks are all theory. They zap out thunder-riven brainstorms left and right. The only problem is that no-one really knows, after the balls of fire have died away, if there is any lasting feasibility in the whole sham-bang.
On the other side of the fence are the practitioners who do just what dad, granddad, and great-granddad have done since who knows when. To these folks, the mere thought of asking “why” you do something is just one step away from total anarchy. They seem to never realize that great-granddad did what he did because he was a wise ol' fellow that converted a principle into a good practical application for his situation. And, if great-granddad were alive today, his application of the principle may well look totally different than what he came up with decades ago. After all, he was a wise ol' fellow who put some thought into his actions, wasn't he?
So, while I am up here on the preachin' stump, I intend to discourse a few minutes about one of the underlying foundations of a sustainable lifestyle. This foundation stone is the big “C” word that represents the attitude that we have concerning ourself and our environment: Contentment.
The well-known early-Christian writer Clement of Alexandria made an interesting observation: “...the best riches is poverty of desires.” It is of absolute necessity for us is to understand what kind of “desires” Clement was referring to. I believe he meant “self-centered ambition”, the idea of “I am going to get all I can, put it into a can, and then sit on the can.”
Poor fellow! Does he realize that sitting on top of a can is not a comfortable place to spend a life-time—or even just a few years? Or worse yet, spend eternity? When we have our needs met, why do we rush and thrush about trying to “fill a can” for ourselves?
A sustainable lifestyle is one that looks to provide our present needs, and then use whatever extra, if we have any, to bless others. Think with me a moment: How much of the unsustainable practices that have destroyed our environment—and by “environment I also refer to our relationships with others about us—have come about from someone striving to “get rich”? To “make a go of it”? To, well, be discontent with what they need?
Going back to the last article about politics and abortion, we saw that making laws to force people to do what they really do not want to do, does not really fix the problem. There has to be a change of attitude, a willful change of desire, to bring about the “cure”. That does not totally destroy the rightful place of government and laws, because some folks will just need to be restrained or they will run over everybody else with a steamroller, then after they have made them into a pancake they will stop the steamroller to go back and get the person's wallet.
And so the real solution to a sustainable lifestyle starts in our inward parts. And I believe that the big “C” word is one of those revolutions that needs to happen within us. So I hope that, if Discontentment is running you around the bush, a Revolutionary War occurs within you, and that Contentment will chop Discontentment's head off.
Ok, time to get off my stump.
Sustainable Living Series
Defining Sustainable LivingWhy Sustain?
Sustainability Politics
Fill the Earth
Tilling the Land
Damaged Dirt
Living Dirt
God's Fertilizer Factories
Sustaining Hard Work
Of Mirrors and Millionaires
No-till + No Spray =???
To Be or Not to Be Organic
The Worst Erosion
Icy Dreams
Biomass Gasifiers
The Ultimate Alternative Energy Source
Pedal Power
The "C" Word
Harvesting the Wind