Drunk
Excerpt from Psalm 60
“O God . . . You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open; repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering. You have made your people suffer hard things; you have given us wine to drink that made us reel.”
Reflection by Quinn G. Caldwell
The good news: as I write, BP has just fit a cap on the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. All signs suggest that the cap is going to hold, and the crack in the sea floor that has had us tottering for months will be closed.
The bad news: this morning, I was driven to the airport, where I boarded a plane. As I write this, I’m somewhere over Atlanta, en route to Albuquerque, from which I will drive three and a half miles alone in a car to rendezvous with my church mission trip. That’s a whole lot of oil burned in just one day…never mind getting home.
I want to use less oil. I do. I know what the carbon I’m putting into the air is doing. I know what the demand for petroleum that my lifestyle creates has done in the Gulf and other places. But it’s like I—and almost everybody else, it seems—have become addicted. It’s like we’ve gotten so used to partying we can’t figure out how to stop. Our lives are so saturated in oil it’s hard to imagine breaking the addiction. I mean, what? I’m supposed to skip the church mission trip? Are you supposed to stop going to work?
Here’s a start: today, walk one place you would normally drive or ride. As you walk, say this:
Prayer
Dear God, I cannot do this without you. Show me how to break this addiction, and then help me to do it. Amen.
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