

Part of the answer is expressed by Charles Ringma in his artfully written and challenging devotional booklet Dare To Journey: With Henry Nouwen:
Sadly, for some, spiritual maturity seems to have nothing to do with openness and flexibility. The opposite seems to be the case. Patterns of believing and doing, like the cart that daily traverses the same dirt road, have worn a deep rut. Spiritual maturity has consequently become synonymous with routine, predictability, and certainty, which so frequently lead to pride and hardness of heart [a description of where I was for a good bit of my adult life -DO].
Nouwen counsels us to see spiritual maturity in a totally different light. “Essential for mature religion,” he writes, “is the constant willingness to shift gears, to integrate new insights, and to revise our positions.” Spiritual maturity is therefore not a state of having arrived. It is not a condition that is a permanent feature of our life. It is not a commodity that is securely ours. It is quite the opposite. It is, in fact, more fragile. It is being willing, in spite of what we have already learned, to search further and to be willing to revise what we may hold so dearly.
The difference between my attitude toward the first Earth Day and 20th Earth Day was my finally being willing “to integrate new insights and revise my positions.” What Ringma says in a following devotional about “some fundamentalists” was true of me—that we “need to acknowledge the difficult questions and the contradictions that life brings our way. If we fail to do this, we convey the idea that our religiosity is rigid, narrow, or unrealistic.”
The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it (Psalm 24:1).
Isn’t it enough for you to keep the best of the pastures for yourselves? Must you also trample down the rest? Isn’t it enough for you to drink clear water for yourselves? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? (Ezekiel 34:19)

Joseph Sittler in his essay “Evangelism and the Care of the Earth” (1973) asked the church a key question: “If in piety the church says, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (Psalm 24:1), and in fact is no different in thought and action from the general community, who will be drawn to her word and worship to “come and see” that her work or salvation has any meaning? Witness in saying is irony and bitterness if there is no witness in doing. . . .

I’m convinced that by not showing that we care about and for God’s good earth, the church is missing one of the best opportunities we have to demonstrate a significant reality about the Gospel: that our Savior is also the Creator and He will one day redeem His entire creation. Such a hope is found only in the Word—a hope desperately needed by many who now hope only in Earth Day. (Read Romans 8:18-27)
[Girl with tree photo source]
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