This morning the boys, Crystal and I decided to watch Disney’s Oceans movie and although I feel like I shouldn’t be that amazed (with a degree in Biology), I was blown away. There is so much we don’t know about our world and all of the creatures that live in our oceans. There is a scene in the movie where a diver actually swims alongside a Great White shark for a span of about five minutes. The ultimate plea from the movie is that the life of the ocean depends on us. And I couldn’t agree more. I feel like the more we know the more power we have to change things. And as was once said in a comic about a masked web slinger, “with great power comes great responsibility”. We are partners in this world with all living things. And we have been charged as care-takers of this world. In Genesis 2:15 we read that God placed man in the garden to work it and to take care of it. The two action words in this text abad and shamar literally mean to serve and to preserve. We were given the responsibility of serving/cultivating and keeping watch over/protecting nature.

Psalm 24:1-2 puts it this way, “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters.” Now I don’t know about you, but usually when I lend something out to someone I like to see it returned in pretty good condition. Maybe that’s just me. But I am often curious…I wonder what God thinks about the state of the world He has given us to care for. A world that has been pillaged by pollution and overuse of it’s resources. I am not trying to push some environ-political agenda here, but I think we can all agree that the world we live isn’t exactly in the pristine condition that God probably intended once upon a time in Eden. And I realize a big piece of the way the world is today is the Sin problem. But isn’t it our struggle to undo the damage of sin. To right the wrongs and bring healing to that which was broken. Maybe that responsibility should extend to the earth as well.

I realize that sometimes movies like the one I watched this morning are overly agenda driven at times. There was even some language at the beginning of the movie that was very pointed towards the origin of life developing from single celled organisms. And although I take serious issue with some of this slanted language, I can’t help but look at the good the rest of the movie was doing. Our world is our responsibility. Our lives depend on our relationships with each other and with the world in which we live. Maybe we can learn to be a little better at being caretakers of the garden in which we were born into.