David:      Karen, in this visit, I want to talk with you about the crazy weather stories that seem to dominate so much of our news.

Karen:     That sounds like a timely topic. These stories have been with us for a good while now and they probably will not be going away soon.

Intro:       Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:      Where should we start, huh? I’m thinking most of all because we were recently there of the fires in the West.

Karen:     Right.

David:      Just massive, massive fires.

Karen:     Not just in California though, that often gets the most national news coverage. But yeah, wow, that’s something out there.

David:      Extreme heat in this past summer, that’s something. And then of course recently the flooding that began in the south and then went all across the northeast even.

Karen:     Taken by hurricane winds all the way up to New Jersey and New York.

David:      Yeah, and these situations aren’t just academic. These are real human beings who are involved. These are fathers and mothers and children and lives that are just totally devastated by what is going on. And then hurricanes following this up, another hurricane coming right on the tail of the preview.

Karen:     And the news report showing these destroyed homes and people saying, “What am I going to do? I don’t have any place to go. I don’t have any items of clothing. I don’t, you know.” Tears, you know, of course you’d feel that way, but it’s just been a very wrenching time to observe and watch all of this.

David:      And there are many natural disasters, earthquakes, rising waters, all of this with a backdrop of worldwide pandemic. I know that we talk about the COVID situation here, but this is worldwide. So, it’s quite a time that we’re going through.

Karen:     We certainly have never lived through anything like this in our lifetime. Eight decades for you and seven decades for me. Nothing like this.

David:     When news seems to be more and more about disastrous weather-related incidents, I think Christian leaders need to start to explore the Bible to see if it has anything to say regarding what’s going on. And I’ve been trying to do that in terms of my own life, and it’s been quite interesting to me. I’m going to read to you, Karen, from the book of Leviticus. The God is speaking, of course, to His people, the Jewish people. “If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops, and the trees, the fruit that they bear. Your threshing will continue, and grape harvest, and the grape will continue until planting, and you will eat all the food you want and live in safety in your land.”

And that goes on for two actual paragraphs beyond what I have read, and then I’m coming to two more paragraphs. “But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, and if you reject my decrees, and implore my laws, and fail to carry out all my commands, and so violate my covenant, then I will do this to you. I will bring upon you, sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight, and drain away your life” and so on. He talks about warfare, being defeated.

If you’re all this, you will not listen to me. “I will punish you for your sins seven times over. I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze. Your strength will be spent in vain because your soil will not yield its crops, nor will the trees of the land yield their fruit.”

And I just read all of that to say, when you go through Leviticus, there is no question. There is a connection between what is happening in terms of nature, and what is happening in terms of how the people are responding spiritually to the Lord.

Karen:     It’s very chilling in light of what we’re going through. When you read those scriptures, it’s not just a proof text you’re pulling out. There’s a lot of references in the Old Testament.

David:      Well, you get stories like Elijah saying to Ahab, it’s not going to rain for a long time. And Ahab, I think, kind of thinking, that silly old goof he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But then the months go by, and the years add up. Now, I don’t care who you are as the national leader, when it hasn’t rain for two or three years, you have problems on your hand. Then the great hunt for where did that guy go? We have to find him. Even the flood. The flood is related to the wickedness of the people.

Karen:     In the Old Testament.

David:      And I’m not trying to equate the United States with Israel. I’m just saying there is some kind of connection, and I’m struggling with what is this, and how do I begin to think about it? Because it’s not talked about that much in terms of the church.

Karen:     Not in the churches that we’re familiar with, but we’re saying to people, Christian leaders, now is the time to begin to examine the whys of climate change. Does Scripture teach that we as people in the way that we choose to live have an impact on our natural disasters? And we do know certainly that when we neglect the land, and the more the ecologists are talking to us and the earth scientists, let’s refer to them that way, they are making very clear distinctions that this isn’t just natural disasters. They are disasters that occur because of what people have chosen to do and how they’ve chosen to live and how they have chosen to degrade our natural environment.

David:      But they’re all related to sin in any way.

Karen:     No, and not to God. That’s not their role actually, and they probably don’t think that way. Most of them. However, Scripture does, and you just quoted one of those passages, there’s an extraordinary article that just came in.

David:      The latest Christianity today.

Karen:     The latest Christianity today.

David:      I showed it to you, and I said, this fellow is probing what has been bothering me and I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I think it’s helpful to read this, Karen.  

Karen:     Well, the title is Global Warming and Reformation. God uses changing climates to change societies. And it’s a very astute article, very integrated into the facts that are being collected outside of our church circles and then spiritualizing it. I’m not saying incorrectly spiritualizing it, but going to the Scriptures and saying, okay, all right, we’re hearing all this in outside commentary. What does the Scripture itself have to say about man’s relationship to the land, to climate, and to God?

David:      And to God. Yeah, I actually marked some of those if you’d read just a paragraph or two, especially Karen, that area that goes into keeping the Sabbath.

Karen:     Okay, for Canaan’s good weather to continue, this is from Deuteronomy. The people had to follow God’s ways. Now, this is what Deuteronomy says. It can’t be too much clearer.

So, “…if you faithfully obey the commands I’m giving you today, to love the Lord your God and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains.” And in many of those countries, there’s an autumn rainy season and a spring rainy season, “…so that you may gather in your grain, new wine, and olive oil.”

So, among the laws God gave Israel, he included land and climate management rules to guide their climate stewardship. And one of them, and this is the one we’re going to emphasize today, because this is something we all can do something about. One of the most striking of those rules is the law giving the land a Sabbath, giving the land a rest.

David:      So, the Sabbath was every week was one day a week.

Karen:     For people.

David:      Yes. For humans.

Karen:     For humans, yeah.

David:      So that there are six days to work and then there’s a day for worship. That was the Sabbath principle. And it’s saying here that there is a principle as well related to the land, and every seventh year the land is to be given a Sabbath.

Karen:     Yes, it’s to be allowed to go fallow. Now who practices that? I think there have been farmers in the past, and maybe now today, I’m sure there are today, who do crop rotation, and they will let a field go fallow because it allows that field to restore the natural nutrients from the environment and from the bottom soils that rise up that have been distressed or removed because of over planting. But in order to understand that you and I are taking it back to a well-loved topic in that we need to understand how important the Sabbath practice is in our personal lives.

David:      No, we’re not Old Testament Israel. It is not such that we say these relate directly to us, but they also do relate indirectly. So, we’re saying there are principles that God has established here. Continue to go through the article as far as the next page.

Karen:     Well, that writer, Michael Le Fibre, he writes, Ancient Israelites were to leave their fields fallow every seventh year. Leviticus warns that ignoring this principle would lead to hardened soil and loss of rainfall, among other troubles. But “…if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze.” That’s Leviticus.

It goes on to describe what happen if the people still will not obey God’s commands. “I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste and your cities will lie in ruins. Then the land will enjoy its Sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate,” 10, 20, 30 years of not being allowed to rest. “Then the land will enjoy its Sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate, and you are in the country of your enemies.”

It’s pretty clear and chilling.

David:      Yeah, it is. And again, I’m wrestling in my mind with how does this relate to where we are as contemporary Americans? And I don’t want to push it to the place where we say those laws were written for Americans. This is not the same relationship Israel had with God as a country, although a lot of our background is certainly Christian and biblical.

Karen:     And Jewish too. I think that one of our problems, this is an analysis, is this. That as we’ve urbanized, we have lost touch with the lands. We aren’t keeping the family farm going. It’s been sold or a mega farming company has been buying up all these small farms.

So, we don’t have backyard gardens. Maybe we have grass, but we don’t take the time to put a garden in or to cultivate a community garden. So, we have lost touch with the land. We don’t have the feelings for it that people used to have in generations before, as most of us don’t have those feelings because of this urbanization, this movement from rural society to urban society. And that’s gone on all over the country. So that’s one thing we really have lost. We don’t think about giving it risk because we don’t have anything we’re gardening or tilling or, you know, most of us.

David:      Well, the truth of the matter is we don’t think about the Sabbath that much either. We’ve lost that whole sense of what is God saying to us. What are His rules that He has established that are a part of this world? And the question is how do we in our minds pull back that to say, okay, is there a responsibility here that we have just missed?

Karen:     We forget that one of the Ten Commandments is you will honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy as unto the Lord. So, there’s work that we all have to do here. And we’re taking it from the big topic of what’s going on in our weather systems to the responsibility each individual has to live out the commands of God and the conglomerate effect of hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people observing God’s principles in their personal life. Then affects the whole. We don’t understand that because we don’t think communally anymore. We don’t think the big corporate anymore. We think individually and particularly those of us in America pride ourselves on our individualism. But God does work with us individually. But He also calls us to be a people of God, a people of faith, a people who are carrying out His commandments.

David:      So, have we pulled this to the place where we got it all figured out?

Karen:     I think each individual listening has to sort of labor with us on their own. What are the things I need to do in order to change my disposition and my intellect in regard to the movements of climate in our country, of weather in our country?

David:      I would say it’s in my mind, me wrestling with, is there a relationship spiritually that makes me ask the question. In fact, one of the good things about this article is he says when you go through these hard times Israel, you should learn to ask the question why. And I think it’s to the same degree that I’m trying in my own life to say why is all this happening? I know that the answer very quickly comes from people, climate change, whatever. But there may be something even bigger than that. And it relates to the whole of the church and what is going on in terms of spiritually people and their relationship to the Lord.

Even Karen, when we talk about Sabbath, that was something we talked about a great deal in our earlier marriage. And it became a matter of principle in our lives that Sabbath was a very important thing that we needed to adhere to in the sense that we didn’t just race through Sunday. You know, Sabbath is more than going to church on Sunday. It’s a whole mindset that says I have worked for six days, but I’m not just a worker, I am also a worshiper.

So, I give one day to the Lord where individually as a family, as a church family, you know, as a nation, we set aside time to worship the Lord. And that was a part of the American heritage. That’s not where the country is anymore. And it’s not where Christians are anymore. You know, Sabbath or Sunday has become just like any other day for the most part, except to go to church. You know, you got an hour where you go to church.

Karen:     The COVID-19 crisis that we’re in, we’re not even doing that. We’re doing virtual church. And a lot of people just don’t like virtual church because one of the joys of gathering together is the whole connection we feel with one another when we face one another, we sit down and talk together, we worship together, we kneel together. Brain scientists tell us that togetherness has positive neurological impact in our lives.

The internet is never going to satisfy that. It just can’t possibly do that. So, we’ve actually had a great loss in a lot of ways. I think the one thing that we learned about Sabbath practice, well, there were huge things that changed our lives. And I’m being convicted that we need to renew that even more, very intentionally, is that on Wednesday, according to the Jewish pattern of Sabbath keeping, they began to look toward Sabbath. When will Sabbath be? You and I were in Israel traveling with a tour group that was Jewish and the more practicing Jews at that time about Wednesday on that trip through Israel began to say, oh, where will we be for Sabbath or Shabbat? Some of them pronounce it that way. They’re thinking on Wednesday. And then it’s supposed to be so wonderful our Saturday, Sunday encounter. And Sabbath actually begins the day before at sundown.

So, on Saturday, sundown, we start a Sabbath practice. It’s so wonderful that we look back with this feeling of I can only describe it beauty filling our heart. And then on Wednesday, we look again to the next coming.

David:       So, it’s like a rotating rhythm week.

Karen:      I’ve called it the rhythm of the sacred.

David:      So, it’s three days to get over the wonder of what happened in three days, prepare for the next great wonder time, which is the highlight of the week, which is Sabbath. Now saying all these things, I still have the sense that as people listen to us, they say, you guys, I thought you were pretty neat people, but you’re cookie.

Karen:      That’s true.

David:      If you’re even suggesting that what is happening has something to do with spiritual patterns, but it does. And in some ways, I’m saying, how do we pull people back to that, which is the right way to look at all this.

Karen:     The right way to live according to God in the scripture.

David:      And there is a sense all through scripture where you get this relationship of God saying, this is how the world has established. And this is the way I want you to live because it’s going to be to your own benefit. And if you violate this, it’s going to cause you huge problems. And I’m troubled as I read these stories, as I see them in the news, I say, maybe there needs to be preaching about this, but I’ve not preached about it, but I’ve never heard a sermon even preached about it. And so, we’re exploring.

Karen:     So, the author of this article says we need to ask God, why?

David:      That’s the biggest thing I did. That’s as far as I have come is exactly where he wanted. I say, why? What’s happening here?

Karen:     What’s happening here? And why? And I think that’s exactly what the Church of America needs to do is when we see these, reportage of these disasters of the flooding from Hurricane in all up to New York City.

David:      And the words that continue saying, in fact, I’ve heard this so many times from the news estuaries, and it’s only going to get worse.

Karen:      Well, yeah.

David:       When something happens, it’s only going to get worse. But what is the something that has to happen? Part of that relates to people like us. We are God followers. We are people who believe what he says in his scriptures, and we try to follow them. And so, it’s just one of those areas where I’m saying, “I can’t leave this alone. I need to process it more and more.” So, I’m doing that with you, and I’m doing that with listeners, and I’m trying to say, what conclusions do we come to?

Karen:     Okay, the CT article says this. I mean, it’s a very full and well written. It’s some of the best writing I’ve seen among our Christian authorities. The land and climate management laws of the Old Testament can help Christians appreciate the importance of climate stewardship today and the climatic damage caused by failing to store God’s earth and its produce righteously. We haven’t even mentioned the ice caps melting. You know, so we’re in an extraordinary period of time, one that’s unprecedented in our lifetime, perhaps in history, because of worldwide weather systems shifting and worldwide pandemic taking over the entire globe.

The COVID epidemic has gone all worldwide, and we’re not facing these variations, the variants. And so, we were rejoicing a little bit thinking we’d be able to go out on masks, we had vaccines, etc., etc. But now we have another variant and they’re not really sure what’s going to come behind all of this. This is the time to ask God why and say, okay, then how is it that we should live?

I have one practical example out of our lives. I’m not saying that everyone has to do this, but I think everyone needs to ask God if they should. So, we have taken red meat out of our diets because the reports show that the carbon emissions from herds of cows, and of course CO2 is one of our greatest polluters and that comes out of all of our cars and millions of cars that are on the road. But we’ve taken beef out of our diet, doesn’t mean we don’t ever have.

David:      And if we go as a guest somewhere and they serve it…

Karen:     …we’re happy to eat it.

David:       Yes.

Karen:     So, it’s largely vegetarian, we’re not strict vegetarians, but if we’re going to get protein from any meat, which we have to have good protein in our diet, then we’ll eat fish and every so often some chicken.

So that’s part of one of the things everyone can do. They can sort of battle things out. I’m not saying they’ll come to the same conclusion, but what is it that we’re eating? Our styles, if enough people form a conglomerate and change things, millions of people change their eating that will have an impact, a healthy impact on our environment.

David:      And what we’re doing is we’re trying to answer the question from a personal basis of why. Why is this happening and what can we do about it? That’s very important before I begin to say, let’s say, if the Lord, as far as you’re concerned, how does he finish that article?

Karen:     Well, he goes into topics that we are not.

David:      He’s going in through the cycle of the calendar year for Jewish people.

Karen:     Yeah. But according to NASA, global temperature, he gives facts like these, global temperatures have risen 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. And that may not sound like much, but it is enough to melt 428 billion tons of polar ice every year, raising sea levels 3.4 millimeters annually.

Changes like these cause more severe storms, droughts, floods, and other natural disasters, events we increasingly see in news headlines and in our own communities. So, because this is happening, we are forced to say then, “What can I do? It may seem like very small things, but how then should we live?”

David:      Yeah, including what do I do about the automobiles? I can’t go back to horse and buggy.

Karen:      Yeah, no, right.

David:       How do I just think in terms of do less driving?

Karen:     Yeah, do less driving. And, you know, we have yet to have the full analysis in electric cars, but that’s one trend that’s happening because of the trying to reduce CO2 emissions.

For me, David, I’ve been reading several writers. Wendell Berry is one of them who have had extraordinary impact on people’s thinking. He’s a naturalist. He has a farm in Kentucky, and he stayed his whole life there and farmed but also written and probably taught as well. But he makes a point that we’re so disconnected from the land, and we used to honor the land. We used to love the land. It went from generation to generation in many places.

So, I am at heart a consummate gardener.

David:      Yeah, that’s very important to you.

Karen:     It’s extremely important to me and I’ve been coming in and I’ve never put in a vegetable garden before back here, but I had more time to do that kind of gardening this year and so I’m coming in bringing in beans. Look what we grew. We grew these little red potatoes. I like, look what we grew. It’s just a treasure day out there all the time.

But I think a way to reconnect with the land is important. Now, a lot of people live in our city or in condos, but there are community gardens and the produce from that then are given to the poor who live around there. You might want to establish a community garden in your neighborhood even in suburbs. So, a way to get back and touch with the land to see how important it is to grow season through season and then you have a time when the soil rests and you have produced, or you have flowers. Now, what has been interesting to me is you have never had any gardening inclination at all as far as I could remember.

David:      That’s fair.

Karen:     You don’t hop up and down on one foot as much as I would like you to, but we put in a rose garden last year.

David:      It’s got you to me, hasn’t it?

Karen:     You are absolutely in it. We have a sign; David’s rose garden.

David:       …should be David and God. Beautiful.

Karen:     But you are out there morning and night. So, I think that’s one way we reconnect. I mean, I don’t walk in my garden one day without my heart lifting and praise to God for what he can make and what he has made and the beauty of his creation is unending creativity. But to watch you with roses. So, I’m saying to people, you may not have any gardening experience in your life. You don’t really know where to start. You don’t particularly want to. But I would recommend if you do nothing but have planter boxes and you can put them out on a porch or in a yard, you do at least that much because that connects you back in a very personal way to the growth element that is a part of all our serious climate exchanges.

David:      I think that’s a good suggestion. I would also say get reacquainted with the Old Testament.

Karen:     Okay, good.

David:      There are some of those sections where the laws laid out by God for his people, they’ve been lost. And it’s time to go back and reread some of those and try to make the connections with, where are we today and how does this apply to me and it’s the wrestling again. The wrestling, we’re not going to solve this for anybody with this podcast. I think we’ll bring it up again in days that are ahead, but we can begin to say, “Okay, I’m asking God why?” Which is the conclusion, the writer of this Christianity Today article comes to. “Why is this happening and am I a part of what is going on?” And I think the answer to that is “Yes, we are a part.” Maybe we’ll come up with different thoughts. I’m thinking instead of driving to the post office in the car every day of the week, I’m going to do it every other day. That’s so tiny, so minuscule, but if the Christian church across America, not the national Christian movement, I’m not saying we’re Israel, but if the Christian church begins to say, “What small things can I do that will benefit all of this.” That would be very important.

Karen:     And then I think it needs to be an intentional research level. So, don’t discard the publishing that are coming out that are different than the way you think. Intentionally read all sides and there’s a variety of opinions and a large discussion going on in the general world about these things.

Read everything that you can so that you are informed at least as to what the dialogue is. Don’t avoid those statements, those articles that are different than the way you think because I often come out of that research saying, “Oh, I haven’t even considered that side. I haven’t heard that before or was stated in a way that was disagreeable to me.”

So be open-minded and then form your opinions, your personal opinions after you’ve done a really good research process. But don’t stop the research process because more and more is coming out on the concept of weather change and what people are discovering and what we can do as individuals or communal. What can a whole town do? A lot of them are really taking, small towns are taking this issue very, very seriously and a lot of exciting things are happening on the local level.

David:      So, our conclusion is that you start to ask why.

Karen:     Yeah.

David:      How come?

Karen:     How come?

David:      How come? what’s going on? What’s going on?

Karen:     Yeah, ask it of God.

David:      And ask it of yourself. I’m not sure we knocked that one out of the park.

Karen:     A couple strikes there, but maybe we’ll get a chance.

David:      Maybe a couple of fall balls, but we’re working on it. Maybe we’ll get a single or double one of these times. Who knows? Anyway, thank you so much, friend, for joining us.

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