By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

I tend to think of my garden as an ecological anti-depressant. With absolutely no substantiation other than my own anecdotal experience, I find that nearly every day soil and growing things save me from hopelessness. As a pastor, I work with people--often people with long ingrained habitual problems. This feels so tremendously large on some days that counseling requires an immediate retreat to the garden just outside my study. In the garden, I find that vegetables grow among the weeds and realize there can be good fruit in human hearts where I have found only weeds. I also find that a little nurture does wonders for plants and the same is true for people. Basically, my garden helps remind me of why I refuse to be a fatalist--either human or ecological. I refuse to live in that kind of despair.

Both Christians and non-Christians suffer from an undiagnosed melancholy in regards to issues of the earth, our ecological home. Some find themselves despairing over the grand and overwhelming task of reversing the direction of the earth. The destruction has gone so far, how could we ever bring it back? Others remain unmoved, either affectionately or persuasively by the goodness of what our world is, has been or could be in the future. But when we take God's story as a starting point (and finishing point) of our ecological involvement, it gives us hope that always leads to action in both small and great ways for the good of the world.

Creation as an act of God calls me to hope in the reality of the planet’s goodness
Our world is good because God is good and He created it. This simple theological reasoning provides the opening scene of God’s story;The creation is “good” because the Creator is good. In fact, He is the only consistent standard of good. The present badness that we experience is because of human choice to disregard God as that standard of goodness. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We continue with those choices today and the ecological fruit becomes more apparent every day. Once we exercised dominion on behalf of God for the continuing goodness of the world, now brokenness and weeds dominate us. Be hopeful, because it was good once, it can be again.

The Exodus as an act of God affirms my hope in the possibility of a better future
In the story of the Exodus, God delivers his people from human-caused slavery and He can deliver us again. The way it is today does not have to be the way it will be tomorrow.  As living proof, believing men and women are daily transformed from the inside out. Countless millions over the ages have been renewed and redeemed. God removed their cold heart of stone and gave them a compassionate heart of flesh. He made them live again as His very own children. Obedient children of God act in simple, daily ways consistent with that new self and this brings about a better future.

The new creation as a future act of God makes my hope in a better future certain
The story of God ends with the renewal of all things. Not their destruction, but their renewal. The Bible describes it as a new heaven and a new earth, always mentioned together. This will be a place where all the original goodness will be restored. We will walk with God, each other and our ecological world as God originally intended. We will properly relate and will properly dominate so that more goodness is seen when we leave a place than when we arrived. This hope is as sure as God Himself.

But, what about...
I see two potential obstacles to this hope: A God obstacle and a scientific obstacle.

Perhaps you simply do not want to bow to God’s story as a starting point. Giving that authority away sounds entirely anathema to you. God forbid, so to speak. Fine. But do realize a few things. First, hope is consistent with God’s story and I dare say it is not consistent with any other. This would explain why hope is largely absent in most ecological movements, perhaps even your own. Secondly, see that this refusal to bow and insist rather on starting with yourself instead of with God mirrors the devil’s trick on Adam and Eve in the original garden--which has resulted in the present despair. It hasn’t worked so far and perhaps it is time for a change.

Say you do believe in God, but this is not the way you were taught to think of creation. You don't believe in its necessity or necessarily even care about what happens to it. After all, there is plenty of other good, God-ordained work to do. In that case, I remind you to look again at the end of the biblical story with a new heaven and a new earth. The two are always found together in the Bible. All things will one day be made right and for now all of creation groans for the children of God to become mature. I encourage you to return to the garden and find hope for the despair of your poor theological training.

Another obstacle to finding hope in God’s story is science, either an over-belief in the ability of science or an under-belief in the reliability of science. Is your hopelessness supported by the scientific data that shows the problem as insurmountable? Be careful here with making science say more than it could possibly say. Science gives us good and useful data, but it says only what is, not what could be. Hope (and despair) goes far beyond the data. Let the good scientific data motivate you, but do not let it take your hope, it is not that kind of information. That would be an over-belief in science. On the other hand, you may doubt the science that says our environment is in trouble. After all, you may feel, science has led to questioning of the biblical account of life’s origins and other values you hold dear. That may be so; however, whether you trust the science or not, you can certainly see with your own eyes the damage that is growing. You can witness the particular effects of your deliberate choices both in your backyard and around the world. Do not let a an under-belief in science’s ability to reliably explain the way things are steal your energy for hopeful action in the world.

Whichever obstacle may stand in your way, God’s story gives hope in the possibility of change--starting with you and me. Just go out in the garden or sprawl on the lawn and let nature preach to you the story of God who created all things, delivers us from our own rightly deserved consequences and will Himself bring about a new, redeemed creation one day. Allow your new-found hope to change your daily experience. Allow it to motivate your daily action. Allow it to become contagious. Something will happen. Tomorrow will be different, tomorrow will be better than today.

 *Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California.