BBC Radio Leicester Thought for the Day
© John Denney 8 September 2004
I’d been out, taking some
rubbish to the tip. “There was a phone
call for you” said my wife. “It was
Chris Highton[1]
from Radio Leicester, asking if you could record a Thought for the Day.” “OK, I’ll give him a buzz”, I said. “But you’re not doing anything until
you’ve mown the lawn.” I should
explain. I hate anything to do with
gardening. Don’t get me wrong. I love gardens. I just detest the hard work that goes into
them. So my wife and I have come to a
deal. I mow the lawns; she does
everything else. And I admire her
handiwork. And I mow the lawns as
infrequently as possible. And she, er, encourages
me to get on with it.
There’s an old joke about a new country vicar admiring someone’s beautiful garden. “Isn’t it amazing what God can do?” he enthused. “You should’ve seen the mess when he ‘ad it all to ‘isself, vicar” came the reply.
But in the Biblical accounts
of creation, we’re told that when God had created man, he planted a garden in Eden and put the Man he had just made
in it. He … set him down in the Garden
of Eden to work the ground and keep it in order[2]. So God
didn’t just create the world and leave it to the forces of evolution and
chance, but went on to plan and plant the Garden of Eden in the world He had
created. And then he gave mankind the
responsibility of being under-gardeners for Him. And we messed it up, and we continue to mess
it up.
The science may not be
completely clear, but it looks as if we’ve messed the climate up through global
warming. The unprecedented hurricanes in
the Caribbean, and the lethal typhoons in the Pacific are like as not,
indirectly our fault. For the sake of
future generations, we’ve simply got to be more environment-conscious.
Now, I wonder if it would be more environmentally friendly if I hired a sheep to crop the lawns….