serve god, save the planet

At the beginning of this summer I quit my job and decided to embark on a "self-improvement summer camp." I gave myself reading assignments, worked on my piano skills, brushed up on current events, bikexplored Chicago, cooked up a storm, and traveled the country. I was trying to refine myself in time for three grueling years of law school, set to start...today, actually!

By the middle of July I don't think I considered myself to have done much improving. I wondered if it all had been a waste. Had I been too hasty and impetuous in throwing responsibility to the wind and devoting a summer to indulging myself?

I couldn't see that there was a flaw in the system I had created from the beginning. And it was right there in the title. Self-improvement summer camp. I, like many people in today's media-saturated society, bought into the idea that indulging myself wasn't just acceptable, but necessary for a life well lived. I began to catch on to the idea that perhaps my dissatisfaction wasn't with my progress but more with the goal. Self-improvement. What about myself did I truly need to improve anyway? Life is about continuous self-refinement. Why would I need to designate an entire summer for it?

You see, the lovely thing about life is that, whether we like it or not, we are always adapting and evolving. Refining. Improving. We don't need to put up seasonal "Under Construction" signs because the implication is that we always are. And, much to my post-camp chagrin, my biggest self-improvements occurred when I finally stopped focusing on making it happen. I traveled to Occidental, California earlier this month to join with environmentalists and pastors from all over the country to found the Presbyterian Conservation Corps, a nationwide initiative to educate and green the church. It was the last bullet point on my list before law school and I by this point I had thrown my summer camp plans by the wayside.

It was then that the changes took place. If I can give any credit to my Summer o' Selfishness it was that it cleared the way for God to come into my heart and start making the real improvements. Or, perhaps, like a sneaky soldier, He simply knew how to invade just as I let down my defenses. Either way, my own summer prophecy was fulfilled in ways I had never even conceived.

For the first time in my life, all my biblical knowledge began to distill and flow through my heart. While I was searching for a higher version of myself, God was desperately trying to get me to look even higher to find Him. And in the weekend I spent camping in the Redwoods in Northern California, He finally was able to lift my gaze. (Perhaps it had something to do with how tall those trees are! He works in mysterious ways!) I read the book Serve God, Save The Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth and spent my time there gorging myself on all things theological. I began to feel a hunger for improvement that had nothing to do with myself. And as I delved into the scripture, I began to see that I need not worry about self-improvement! God asks us to put our trust in Him and rely on Him to sustain and renew us. He doesn't require us to embark on summer-long journeys for betterment because with Him we can find higher ground at any old time.

God was shouting down at me from above those Redwood trees that there were other improvements to be made. Essentially, while God is working to change and better every one of us daily with His love, He asks us to make the improvements that He cannot. Now, don't go throwing the ol' omnipotence argument at me here because I'm going to come right back and remind you that one of God's biggest gifts to us (and one often forgotten when we choose to blame Him for our woes) is free will. As a result, I am led to believe that while God moves our hearts, we still move our hands. And another of His amazing gifts, the gift of creation and the gift of our companionship to one another is being exploited, abused, and destroyed daily. How could I possibly be so blind to the improvements God was calling to make in His beloved world?

For years I have balked at the idea of being a "servant of God." Truly, I don't think I even knew what it meant. Why would God create us simply to serve Him? How silly, I thought. And a little self-involved on God's end of things. I resented God for putting me in a world of splendor and then asking me to ignore it in favor of being His servant. Despite everything I had been told of God's gifts and blessings, I simply didn't feel grateful enough to want to devote my life to serving Him. And for many years, I think I felt I was really getting away with something. Doing my part to give back just enough before it became inconvenient. Furthermore, I reasoned, when salvation was guaranteed to me as long as I trusted and loved God and asked for His forgiveness, why would I do more than I was already doing? I was guaranteed my lot in heaven.

And this is where the real improvement came in. After years of worship by rote I began to truly understand the importance of my role as a servant. And the reasoning behind it. Christians believe that God loves us like children; He has lovingly designed every one of us and blessed us with a beautiful, magical, mysterious world to live in and enjoy. Without free will, loving Him would mean nothing. So He gave us free will so that we may love Him truly and feel the true joy of finding His love in the world and accepting it as ours to keep. Yet, free will came with a price. As the flawed beings that we are, we began to destroy God's gifts to us almost immediately. God's gift to Adam and Eve, Abel, was destroyed by Cain at the beginning of creation. Now, Cain's ancestors have adopted his destructive and murderous ways. We as a human population kill Abel over and over again with the choices we make and the ways we relate to one another. And God, the world's true loving father, must watch His children suffer at one anothers' hands.

Environmentalism fits right in to God's call for service, you see, because when we destroy this particular glorious gift, we are not only shirking God's blessing, but we are destroying each other as well. When we hurt the Earth it hurts us back. This was part of God's design, too. The strength and power of the Earth exists so that the Earth may sustain countless generations of God's people. Yet, as we fail to protect it and instead disrupt its delicate and perfectly designed equilibrium, the Earth is reacting just as God designed it: to warn us. We are ravaging one of God's greatest and most beautiful gifts to us and, as a result, ravaging ourselves. Air and water pollution. Soil erosion. Climate change. We are hurting the Earth so badly that it will not be fit to live for the generations of beloved sons and daughters God has planned for the future.

The fact is, that environmental destruction affects God's people directly because it destroys their home, their ability to sustain themselves, and endangers their health. For example, even on our homefront, 600,000 children have air pollution-related asthma attacks every year. 110 die each year simply because of the pollutants we are pumping into our air. How can any Hummer-driving Christian citizen justify this choice when it is directly affecting his neighbors?

Bringing this back to serving God; we are called to be servants of God not out of sheer fancy. Because God loves every single one of His children, and so many of His children are suffering, He is suffering too. The God that loves and provides for us is deeply aching over the despair felt by millions of His beloved sons and daughters. And so that is why He calls us to serve Him. There is pain in the world that He is begging us to absolve. There is destruction in the world that He is begging us to stop. There is so much improvement He cannot do.

And so how could I possibly think that I would find fulfillment in directing that improvement towards myself?

On the train home (just a small way I can lessen our Earthly destruction, by avoiding plane travel whenever I can) I began to ask myself in what ways God is asking me to make non self-improvements. This whole summer I was preparing myself for law school. And I had satisfied myself with the notion that I would be an ethical field leader, my Christian principles guiding my legal work in the potential fields of human rights or environmental law. But, as God had begun to make His improvements on me, I began to see that perhaps law was not where I was meant to make my improvements, after all. I foresaw my legal victories and knew that while I could certainly do good there, I am being called to do more good elsewhere.

Like the servant idea, another aspect of God that I had never been able to fully understand or accept was His request that we follow Him and listen to His call, as afraid as we may be. And just as my perception of serving Him transformed before my very eyes, so did this thrilling (and terrifying) concept. Blinded by silly things like "self-improvement" I had completely ignored God's consistent plea to us to love Him by loving our neighbors and keeping the needs of those suffering around us always in our minds. Would a posh legal life really allow me to do fully do that? I was astonished to hear God's voice loud and clear on this one, "No!"

For so long I had interepreted the gifts of my intelligence and fearlessness to be ones God had meant for me to use in the courtroom. But I soon began to see that I could not fully realize His plans for me before a judge and jury. God gave me a mind strong enough to study and understand His word, and a spirit fearless enough to follow His will even into frightening territory. So I made a decision.

Yesterday, the day before law school was to begin, I answered God's call as fearlessly as I could and deferred my acceptance for a year. I am giving up my lease at my wonderful Chicago apartment. I am selling my car and brand new laptop. I am going to serve God in Biloxi, MS where improvements are desperately needed post-Hurricane Katrina. And then I am going to serve Him in seminary.

The idea behind my self-improvement summer camp was that I was in control of the Rachael refinement process. God, however, has things set up quite differently. I am happy to report that I need not worry about the self-improvement side of things any longer. As long as I put my love and trust in the Lord, I will continue to become better, because I will continue grow closer to and more like Him.

I invite you to read along as I embark on this new, exciting, scary adventure. Things can only improve from here!