New Year, new resolutions
It is that time of the year when many of us are setting goals or resolutions to focus on during the entirety of 2024. That is why we are taking a minute to talk about our goal as A Rocha, and why we hold it in such high esteem. Ultimately, the goals we set for a given year should in some way be building blocks for the goals we have set for the next 10 years which will in turn help us achieve our lifetime goals.
A huge portion of my work as a communications person is to share the vision (goal) of A Rocha Kenya with the rest of the world. To help our partners, friends, and everyone really, appreciate the why behind everything that we do. As a Christian organization in conservation, the Bible is the basis of all that we do. And that is why today, in a brief way, I wish to take us back to the very beginning, not just the beginning of A Rocha Kenya, but the beginning of our mission, which was given at the very beginning of the universe itself.
If you love me...
After creating everything (that was good) God created man to take care of His creation, entrusting him (man) with the responsibility of the highest order. The Bible says that “The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. (Genesis 2:15, NIV)”. Somewhere else, the Bible records that God created man to honour and glorify Him (God). And through Jesus’s own words, we know that we love God (show that we honour Him) by obeying His commands [John 14: 15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.]
Throughout the Bible, I have come across two commands that directly speaks to our vocational life, one is care for the world given in Genesis 1, and the other is go out and make disciples of all nations given in John 3. But even the great commission given in John 16, contains an element of taking care of the creation. Some manuscripts speak of spreading the gospel to all of creation, not just people!
Conservation is a lifetime goal, meant for all of us
From us as individuals to the many A Rocha organizations throughout the world, we understand that taking care of the environment is a job description given to all of us. It isn’t a career path or something we do just on the side, it is a mandate…a life-long goal assigned to all of us. Which means the daily, or weekly, or monthly, or yearly sub-goals we set, should in one way or another take us one step further towards accomplishing this goal.
The shape that taking care of God’s world will take may vary from person to person, organization to organization. Because at the end of the day, we can’t all work for conservation organizations just like we can’t all be front-line missionaries. But we can all be part of the conservation efforts.
Over the years, conservation (taking care of God’s creation) has been left in the by stands, often viewed by many as something that is neither here nor there. A vacation reserved for the selected few. But this couldn’t be any further from the truth. Taking care of this world is a responsibility for all of us! It is not a stretch to say we were created for this very purpose, because we were created for this very purpose! As we observed above, the sole purpose of man is to honour God, and what better way to do that than by doing what He created us to do.
Setting New Year resolutions
When writing this article, I am sitting here in the A Rocha Kenya compound, taking in the vista before me. Perching on the nearby trees, I can hear birds singing their melodious songs which blends well with the sound of the waves from the ocean a few metres away.
In sharp contrast, I remember the many places I have been where excessive distraction has been done. Where nature doesn’t smile at you but mourn, where everything has been burned to the ground. Where the waters have been polluted and the environment neglected, or even worse reduced to nothing but means of making short-term profits.
Instead of passing on the same old tale “the good old days”, where the air was fresh, when global warming was unheard of, and climate change was yet to be a thing. Maybe we can be a voice of change. It is my prayer that as we set this year’s resolutions, one of them will be “I will make sure that all my wastes are disposed properly, and I won’t use single-use plastics”