no meat thursday, and other animals

so last year sometime the beautiful Valerie and myself decided to take a day out of the week and make it meat-free – and so we chose a Thursday for reasons i can’t remember

[no that doesn’t mean on Thursdays we run down the streets giving away packs of bacon to people altho i can’t see how they wouldn’t appreciate it – the people i mean, not the bacons]

and we encouraged people in our community (our church congregation enGAGE and my weekly thort for the week community) to consider doing likewise

and then after talking about it for a long time we decided to start some recycling as well (and by that i don’t mean we would go out on our bikes somewhere and then repeat the route – oh wait, we don’t have bikes, who were those people?) and so we put some crates outside our place and now have space for glass and tins and cardboard and plastic

then after a while – and big piles of stuff outside our window – we actually discovered where we can take that stuff and so we started actually recycling [altho we are still needing to figure out what to do with the cardboard cos the BP does not have a bin for that] and last nite we told the guy who stays in the flat next to us and he has already started putting his empty bottles with out

and we wrote an email to the complex we stay in and they sounded positive and said they would bring it up at the next meeting and so hopefully it will become an official part of where we stay

my point is that as easy as it is to bury your head in the sand and pretend the situation is so overwhelming (which it seems to be at times) that why bother doing anything… or you can start somewhere – one couple not eating meat and doing a bit of recycling is not going to change the world, but one couple and their next door neighbour man? well who knows?

what are you doing for your planet? and the next generation?

Save the. Plan it!

so i guess in some small part it was thankx to a stalkery type australian girl that me and tbV started thinking about what we eat and then started No-Meat-Thursdays which has actually been quite a rad extension of our lives and only occasionally interfered with ‘normal’ life – so every Thursday we don’t eat meat just as a small small step in terms of meaning one-day-a-week’s less meat needing to be there i guess and i know a bunch of okes from enGAGE and maybe wider around have joined in as all so maybe soon we will have saved our first cow and can celebrate with a spit braai… okay maybe not.

but the point is that God put us in charge of this planet and gave us dominion over the animals and the fishes and so on and we have largely stuffed it up largely cos of selfishness and greed as is usually the case when we are talking about us and the stuffing-upness of life… so we have not done as we should and it is up to us as Jesus-followers to be involved in that – well it’s up to everyone really, but Jesus-followers have it as part of their mandate and i guess this is an area which is always viewed as separate from the church, often because a number of the people calling it to our attention are a bunch of nut jobs (lets be honest and yes that’s a generalisation but only because it is generally true – not ‘all’ but ‘a number of’ and usually the ones that shout the loudest and are thus more visibly seen).

a second thing me and tbV eventually started doing is recycling. a bit. in that i’m not sure we know exactly how to do it or if we’re doing it right but we have a container outside our back door for glass and one for cardboard and one for cans and one for plastic and we keep stuff separate from general garbage and stick it in there and we finally discovered a place in town (at the BP incidentally) where we can drop it off and did our first drop off the other day (after months of collecting and not knowing where to drop off)

so it’s not much for sure, but it’s something – one day of not meat and a bunch of recycling – it can be a little bit of a mission (going to braais on Thursdays and driving to town with bags of crap) but it is necessary and this is an area where i do think the church needs to get a lot more involved.

starting with you and what are you doing?