Dearth Hour

In the quiet hours leading up to 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, the time known by Statists as "Earth Hour", I quietly pondered how best I could help toward the quest of saving the planet. As I walked to every light switch and lamp throughout our humble home, silently turning each fixture on, I felt as though I were at a memorial service for the statists.

Bathed in glorious light, our home was transformed into one immense architectural filament, burning an ungodly sum of kilowatts as we watched Ben Stein's documentary, "Expelled".

Since January, when I received a $350 electric bill from Dominion Power (in Virginia), we immediately began heating with a wood stove, we kept most lights out most of the time as we usually do, and I raced out to purchase several CFL bulbs to cut down on our power consumption. The dirt and smoke that was generated inside our home gave my wife and I bad respiratory conditions, with my wife ultimately developing pneumonia. It doesn't sound too scientific or medically sound, but I attribute our illness to the wood stove for we never catch colds or the influenza. It ended up costing us about $2,000 after insurance. So much for trying to save money.

As Christians, we are called to be good stewards of everything we have the privilege of using; this includes money, talent/ability, land, time, and energy. As temporary tenants of Earth, we humans have done some damage, but we have not created global warming. This is a fact that cannot be disproved for a variety of reasons, namely that polutants have only been measured for less than a century. HOW old is Earth?

Still, we need to be conscientious toward efficient living. This can mean recycling, but it also can mean not wasting gas and water. There are moss-eating tree-huggers out there who own whirlpool bathtubs and waste more water filling them up and then they run the motor on top of it all. How green are they really being? Efficient living also can mean not eating fast food. That's a whopper of a sacrifice for some of us!

I could go on about the misconceptions of rainforest rape, Prius purchases, and green building, but for now, my advice to you is to be moderate in your energy consumption, but don't get hung up on it.

"Let your light shine before men...."