Sabbath Devotional :: Life is Life is Life

My daughter Eve and I found a tiny bird egg while digging underneath a Blue Spruce this week.

She carefully rolled the white egg over in her small grubby hands, tenderly inspecting each minuscule speckle. Then looking to me for answers. She asked, “Where mommy-daddy bird go?” I could tell she was deeply troubled why the egg was all alone. I explained that the egg must have fallen from the nest and that the family must be somewhere high in the trees.

She proceeded to line up the pine cones she had been playing with. Biggest cone became “daddy pine cone” with the slightly smaller pine cone as “mommy pine cone”. Then she proceeded to lay down different sized smaller pine cones as the brothers and sisters. She cradled the egg and placed it with the pine cone family. She carefully built the egg her own version of a nest. It was a safe place.

This two-year-old gave the only thing she could conceive that would make all the injustice in her small world better: the gift of family.

This quiet sermon spoke to my mind in a powerful way.

With all the rightful concern for our living planet, why is the family ecosystem not mentioned alongside endangered ecosystems? Why is the womb, our first environment, not discussed in those same terms and with the same level of concern? Is this not where lessons of abundance mindset are first formed? Is this not where humans first learn their care, responsibilities, and stewardship? Why then have we compartmentalized these areas when in reality they go hand in hand?

Before we can save the planet, we need to save the family. Before we can save the family, we need to empower the female to stand in all her might and glory in protection of ALL LIFE. We need to invite men to stand with us to give of their divinely appointed gifts of selflessness, respect, and protection. How fitting that my small Eve would remind me of this.

We need to embrace our serious parental stewardship within our homes and communities as safe places where the smallest and most vulnerable ones among us are reared in love and protection. Where our sexed human bodies are honored and thus linked to their full capacity to bring new life into the world. Only then will we foster the deep regard for an extension of those environments into our natural ecosystems and environments. Only then will we care enough to make generational changes that will preserve and maintain our natural environment for generations of living things to come.

We need our children to be sound and whole and happy so that we can preserve the same things within us as well. So we can keep alive our own sense of wonder and reverence for all life. We need their tiny hands and wide eyes to teach us how to nurture the smallest creatures and protect the smallest spaces with great sincerity and love. We need them for the sake of our own humanity. Only then will we take seriously our parental stewardship as harmoniously integrated with our earthly stewardship. Only then will we be motivated with enough love to really change.

To save our children and families means that we likewise replenish and save the environment too. It means we keep families together at all costs, and that we support one another in our times of crisis so that families can remain intact wherever possible. We never intentionally separate eggs from their nest, right? We help the parents to help their children. We NEVER intentionally separate children from their families!

Life is life is life.