Earth Hour

I felt like a little silly as I walked through the house turning out lights at 8:30 last night for the much hyped Earth Hour. I felt even sillier stumbling around in the kitchen trying to finish dinner in the dark. But in my experience there is a mysterious correlation between how dumb something makes you feel and how good it is for you.

When we are busy posturing as adults (whatever those are) and glorying in our own imagined intelligence and self sufficiency, we miss so much. New experiences slide off us like teflon and strange ideas are no more than amusing novelties, if we notice them at all.

George MacDonald wrote, "All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them." You could even say, "that truth may be revealed to them."

Last night, as Ross and I sat in our dining room eating our dinner by the light of a couple of candles, I was overcome with a child like wonder. Suddenly that old familiar space, now hushed and flickering, was completely new. In that moment, instead of wondering what the neighbors were thinking about my pitch black house, or cursing the WWF for making me turn off my computer for an hour, or thinking of all the reasons this was a futile act, I was open to the simple truth.

I don't want to be a wasteful person in anything - not with money, not with food, not with time, and not with energy. I realized that I probably use upwards of 2x the energy I actually require on any given evening. This just doesn't gel with my desire to be a good steward of all the gifts God provides. So I started Earth Hour at 8:30 grumbling and cynical and came out of it at 9:30 humbled and glad.