Wednesday's Words for November 19, 2014

I’m not going to complain one bit about the unseasonable cold, or the four inches of snow we have on the ground. I’m not going to grumble about the slightly impaired driving conditions, or having to take extra care getting about when I’m outside. I’ve been watching the news, and I know so many of my American friends have it so much worse.

 I don’t think I have ever seen as much bad weather as y’all have been having over the last few months. My beloved and I sit down a few nights a week to watch the evening news on ABC, and each time we have, there’s been another headline about severe weather in the United States.

More often than not, we just sit and stare, and then say, “Again??”

Monday night it was reported that the mainland US is currently more than 50 percent snow-covered, and it was only about 12 percent covered this time last year. That’s a heck of a difference. And cold? This latest influx of arctic weather we’re all enduring makes last year’s polar vortexes seem like an autumn chill.

Now, the weather is the weather, and it is cyclical. We humans have only been recording it scientifically for what, just over a century? So we don’t really know what the big picture is, with regard to “normal”. We have a tendency in our own ego-centric way, to call “normal” that which we’re used to. But we don’t know whether a span of several years of highly unsettled, unstable weather isn’t on its own, normal.

But on the surface of things it appears as if our climate is running amok, meteorologically speaking. And I have to wonder how anyone can truly doubt that we’ve damaged our own environment with the way we have carelessly spewed chemicals and gasses into the air for decades.

There’re these things in existence called natural laws. One of those laws is summed up as “cause and effect”. Or, if you prefer a biblical term for it, “sowing and reaping”.

Yes, they’re the same thing.

You have to wonder, if our atmosphere ideally is comprised of a balance of certain gasses, and we send other gasses recklessly into the mix, how we could expect anything but change and upheaval when nature’s balance is disrupted that way.

We have to do a better job of stewardship with regard not only to this planet but the creatures and people populating it. God gave us this planet, and we need to respect his gift, and take better care of it, because from all I’ve heard and seen, there’s not another one waiting in the wings for us to use.

Some problems in life seem insurmountable to us. They’re huge in scope, and we think, since we’re so puny, that we can’t do anything to make a difference. But that thinking is just plain wrong. If everyone does something, then something big will happen.

 Let me say that again, because it is important. If everyone does something, then something big will happen. That’s not wishful thinking or naiveté or even unbridled optimism.

That, my friends, is mathematics.

Here’s a simplistic illustration of what I mean. Have you ever seen that proposition: which would you rather have, five million dollars, or a penny doubled every day for 30 days?

Did you ever work it out mathematically? One cent, on day two, would be two cents; on day 10 it would be $10.24. On day 20, it’s looking a little better – it’s now $10,485.76. And on day 30? $10,737,418.24.

One cent isn’t much—it’s what you do with it that counts. Combined, multiplied, it’s a fortune. So too are the acts, the small, daily acts, that we each can perform, the small decisions we each can take every day, to do a better job taking care of our planet.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury