There’s something edifying about digging one’s hands into the dirt, getting black under the fingernails, interacting with creation. Somehow, doing so, connecting ourselves with the earth that God has created and given us as a gift to inhabit, somehow that helps us connect with God, and, if we’re lucky, with other people as well.
That’s what happened a few weeks ago when I was fortunate enough to hang out with Madison’s summer Leadership Academy. For those of you who don’t know about the Academy, it’s a leadership program for grade school through high school students, meant to allow them opportunities for personal growth, both as believers and as leaders in the Church. The format is pretty simple. The high schoolers mentor the grade school students, allowing both ages groups to both bless and be a blessing to each other. Every Thursday the students gather together with a group of volunteers and staff from Madison to talk through a topic or two for the week. Then the entire group participates in a service project, followed by discussion relating the words and work to each other.
The week I was able to attend dealt partially with spiritual disciplines. As part of this, we drove over a few blocks to Dickinson Elementary and worked through the hot afternoon (made mercifully better by free ice cream from Dickinson’s outgoing Principle Dorothy Johnson) weeding the school’s front landscaping arrangements.
While I didn’t exactly think about it at the time, I was interacting with God’s creation at that moment, resting in the natural beauty he has given us, but also engaging in the sort of toil that can be both a blessing and a curse to humanity, in that it fulfills us, but also is necessarily work. More than just interacting with nature, though, we were, as a group, caring for another aspect of God’s creation: people. The fact is that in the midst of us working on a task, engaging in labor of sorts, we were benefiting both ourselves and others.
The other day I was on my lunch break at my job. There’s a sticker plastered to the side of my Nalgene proclaiming that “I love God’s Creation.” One of my coworkers carelessly murmured something about how she was God’s creation too. She was undoubtedly joking, but for me there was instantly a deeper meaning that directly applied to how I felt working alongside the Academy students on that hot July day. When we care for one aspect of creation, we often care for other facets of it as well. And it doesn’t go unnoticed. In fact, that kind of care has reverberations, which is exactly how God meant it to be.
Principle Johnson brought us ice cream while we worked because she is a kind, dedicated, and loving servant of a woman. But another part of her generosity was reciprocal in response to our volunteering at the school she supervised for the last number of years.
In this way, we as Academy members saw the truly cyclical nature of blessings. God blesses us. We seek to act in response to that blessing. By doing so, we bless others. And they bless us. And in the midst of all that blessing, we catch a glimpse of a world with a completely selfless savior at its center, and suddenly, the new creation seems a bit closer to this one.
-Brandon Haan
P.S. Pray.
