Quiet Time: Environmental Stewardship

Dear God of all creation,

This morning I stood at the kitchen window and watched a robin pull a worm from the rain-softened earth — the same small miracle that has unfolded in gardens since Eden. And I remembered that You who told Israel to love the stranger because they were once strangers in Egypt also entrusted us with every creek bed, every stand of oak, every field that feeds the widow and the orphan.

Deuteronomy 10:19 calls us to love the vulnerable — and Lord, the land itself has become the stranger among us, exploited and overlooked. The river that baptized generations of believers downstream runs cloudy now. The soil that once fed a parish grows thinner each season. When we poison the water table, it is the poorest who drink from it first. When we strip the hillside bare, it is the elderly widow whose home floods in the storm.

Forgive us for treating Your handiwork as disposable. Teach us the Anglican rhythm of ora et labora — prayer and work — so that our devotion spills out of the sanctuary and into the garden, the watershed, the neighborhood commons. Make us faithful tenants of this estate You have lent us.