I used to think very little about the environment or about the way I wastefully used the resources God had given me. As Christopher J. H. Wright teaches in his wonderful book The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative
Living in Santa Marta has helped me grow in my understanding of what this means. Two weeks ago on a Sunday morning I went to turn the water on and nothing came out. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll just go turn the pump on to fill the tank above with water.” (Cultural note: Any good house in Santa Marta has both an underground and an elevated tank for water storage.) When I turned the pump on, it made a funny noise and didn’t do anything. “Oh, the pump must be broken,” so I called the owner, and he told me to check the underground tank’s water level. Lo and behold, there was about three inches of water on the bottom of the tank but not enough to reach the intake pipe. Not having water on a Sunday morning threw my rythmn off. We couldn’t take showers, and we couldn’t flush the toilets. I’d never noticed how much we need water! Thankfully that afternoon the underground tank filled a little, but after that we had water service about once every three days, so we were in major conservation mode.
Now, as a Christian and as a human, I have a responsibility to take care of the resources God has given me. What most frustrated me about this situation is that in some neighborhoods I saw people washing their sidewalks, their cars, and pouring abundant water on their plants and grass. They did this, apparently unaware that in the same city there are people who have water only once per week because of the scarcity. That is not how God wants us to act!
I thank God for these little lessons he teaches me every day here in Colombia. By the way, God sent a lot of rain this last week, so we have a good supply of water.
Note: The photo attached to this post shows the water collection area for the whole city when it had fallen to roughly 30% of its normal capacity because of the lack of rain.
