Daily Climate Change and Hope

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts — that's what Paul writes in Colossians 3:15. Not a passive peace, not the kind that closes its eyes and hums while the house burns down, but a ruling peace. A peace with authority. A peace that looks at a warming world and says, "I will not be governed by despair."

There's a Baptist church in coastal Louisiana where the congregation has watched the Gulf swallow nearly a foot of their parish land every year. They could have packed up. Instead, they planted salt-tolerant grasses along the shoreline after Sunday service, still in their church clothes, mud on their good shoes. Their pastor told them, "If God gave Noah a blueprint for the flood, maybe He's giving us work boots for the rising tide."

That's the kind of hope Colossians 3:15 invites — not optimism that pretends everything is fine, but peace that anchors the soul while the hands get busy. When you watch a glacier calve into the sea on the evening news, let grief do its honest work. Then let the peace of Christ rule. Grief and peace are not enemies — they are partners in the kingdom.

Father, You who spoke the oceans into their boundaries and called every season good, grant us the courage to tend what You have made. Not out of panic, but out of love — the same love that drove You to shape rivers and name stars. Make us people whose hope is not fragile, but Christ-rooted and dirt-stained, reaching toward restoration with open hands. Amen.