Going Green: Altering Yourself to Help Your Environment

"Going Green" has been a hot topic for the last few years. With more and more people becoming aware and concerned with the environment, the craze continues to gain ground. Though I am not an environmentalist, I do get concerned with throwing so much trash away and thinking about the earth and generations to come.

When I was investigating the concept of "going green" I found out something interesting, at its essence. One simple explanation was "altering your activities to help your environment". When you enter a room/environment, we are going to affect that environment. What effect will you have when you enter your workplace, your home, a store/check out line, a restaurant, etc.?

This "Going Green" is not so much the global environment, but more the unseen environment/atmosphere. We looked at five of the seven churches in Revelation, chapters 2 & 3, to get an idea about how a bad environment is not very appealing to God. Here are some applications to choose from this week...

1. Reflect back over the past few hours or days of work. How did your actions pollute or improve the environment?
2. Reflect back over the past few hours or days at home. How did your actions pollute or improve the environment?
3. Be conscious of trying to improve an environment which you enter in to. So, the next time you go shopping, try to improve the environment by helping someone, saying something nice to someone, calling your cashier by name, buying a cashier a candy bar - to say thanks, or some other way that may help the "environment".
4. Pray that God would help you as you aspire to help the various environments that you are in.
5. Self-reflect different areas that you need to clean up your body/mind "environment". Is there negativity toward someone? What do you need to do to "go green" and positively alter that environment?
6. Pray for your church family so that we can have a positive environment for which God to work and that He will be pleased to "digest" our service and worship to Him.
   

Recycling, planting trees, reducing hazardous materials, and many other things will help the earth to not be polluted. It will also save many natural areas and habitats.

With these same concepts, we can "go green" and create an environment that is reduced from pollution and allow our environment to not be "polluted".

Remember the catch phrase from Woodsy the Owl..."Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute!" Click here to recall one of those commercials.