Earth Day is today.
Earth Day dates back to 1970. It started in the United States and became the launch pad for the environmental movement. Today, it is marked in 192 countries, and more than 1 billion people participate in Earth Day activities every year. An enormous effort. The Earth Day Network does amazing work in raising awareness and promoting campaigns for sustainability. I popped by their website this morning and was struck by the strength of these numbers and the strength of verbs. Join. Recycle. Protect. Pledge. Become. Help. Choose.
Loud and clear, the Network preaches – you can make a difference!
But the difference in my day is that of stillness. From where I sit, today isn’t feel like a day for activism. I want to sit still instead. Sit and be grateful. Spring has arrived in our neighbourhood, and we’re suddenly in those first days when you can believe in warmth and growth again. Over the weekend, we had sunshine and time to sit in the garden. There was also time for some gardening work – just a few things to make a difference but we’re hopeful. We made space in the garden for potatoes and shallots. There will be rainbow chard again this year and we’re trying garlic, too. I made some newspaper pots and planted some tiny perennials. The kids have been making collections of snail shells and watching the ants go about their business. On Friday, it was even warm enough to sit on the front steps with a sandwich at lunchtime.
It all felt like a gift.
This morning, we woke to sunshine again. As we ate our breakfast, we watched the light falling on the bright green leaves of the hedge around the garden. There was a little wind, too, and as I walked Beangirl to school, it felt like chillier than I had expected. Now the wind has blown the clouds in. I can hear a little rain falling against the window.
But this, too, is a gift. The strawberries will like the rain and so will the tulips which are looking optimistically full, but still quite closed. There’s growth to come, and the rain will help.
Andrew Stephens-Rennie has got me thinking about gifts today. He wrote this week about gifts of the Spirit on Empire Remixed, and about our misguided understanding of the nature of gifts. He tell a story about of being young and worried about doubt – and about the advice he was given that all he needed was to have more faith. But, he writes, faith is a gift and we don’t get to decide how much we get.
“You can’t force the Spirit’s hand. You can’t force her to give up the goods, because faith, like all the spirit’s gifts, is just that. It is a gift. And faith, like each gift of the Spirit is “activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
This is why we need the body. This is why we need the church. Each of us has received a gift. But they are not the same gifts, and they have not been distributed in equal measure. We need each other.”
The Spirit knows that we need faith. And we need strong verbs. Protect. Commit. Help. We need the activists and their ideas and energy. We need the campaigns and the policy-changers, the reporters and the promoters.
We also need the quiet and the gardens. We need the gift of gratitude and time to see. We need community. And we need glimpses of hope, hidden among the daily work of our life.
In today’s stillness, I’m aware of the gift of hope. Hope draws us into tomorrow. It’s is planted like potatoes in garden, growing unseen. Hope stirs within us like my small and tumbling occupant growing towards July and a birth day. Hope makes us work and makes us rest – this is the rhythm of our faithfulness.
And all these good gifts come from God.
