Delivered to the congregation of First Congo on 4/22/2018:
So, today is
the day: EARTH DAY! It’s a day that we celebrate the earth! Yeah, “Happy Earth day to you, Happy Earth
day to you, Happy EARTH DAY dear Ear-erth!
Happy Earth day to you!” And what
a planet to celebrate! It gives us air
to breathe by having all the big, beautiful trees make oxygen, and food to eat
from the clean soil, and water to drink!
Earth takes good care of us. None
of the other planets do that! You can’t
get that on Mercury, or on Venus, or on Jupiter, or on Mars, or on Pluto, or on
Saturn, or on Neptune, or on the other planet which name I won’t say in
church! But, the planet Earth has
everything on it for all of us and it takes good care of us.
And, what do
we do when someone – or, I guess in this case, something takes care of us? We
say “Thank you!” But, how do we say
“thank you” to the planet Earth? Like
this: “Thank you, Earth!” Just like the Earth takes care of us, we have
to take care of it. You might say, “But,
I’m only one person! What can I do to
take care of the earth?”
Well,
plenty. In the book of Genesis, we’re
told to “till the earth and keep it.”
That means that we can work the land, but keep it safe also. All we have to do is pay attention to the
things we use every day. Can the things
we use be reused or recycled?
I brought
some items and stuck them to the stage-podium-box thing here. And you’ll see some numbers next to
them. Now, what number is next to the
plastic straw? 7.5? Right now, there is an estimated 7.5 MILLION straws
on the edge of the oceans of the United States, and around the world the land
that touches the water is covered by possibly 8.3 billion plastic straws.
Do you see
that plastic bag? What number is next to
it? 100?
Every year there are 100 BILLION plastic bags used in the US, and 500
BILLION used around the world. That’s
one plastic bag for every man, woman and child every 4 days. The city of Memphis spends $5.6 million
dollars every year to bury plastic bags in landfills. Guess what:
It takes between 10 years to 1000 years for a plastic bag to decompose!
See the
plastic bottle? What number is next to
it? 1?
Seeing that number, how many plastic bottles do you think are used every
minute? 1 million bottles are used per minute, and each bottle takes more than
450 years to decompose! Less than 14
percent of plastic gets recycled per year, and that means that there’s a lot of
garbage out in our planet that will never go away – unless we pay attention to
the things we use!
And, now,
what’s that number next to the earth that I drew? 1.
Hold up one finger. There’s only
one earth like our earth, just like there’s only one of each of you. You are special because nobody else is like
you in the world, and we only have our one world which makes it special so we
HAVE to take care of it!
So, I just
put down a bunch of numbers, and what does it all equal? I have NO clue! I stink at math. But, I do know that your adults can help you
figure it out, and that there are ways we can save our planet. There are now stainless steel straws that can
be reused, and we reuse plastic bags all the time at our house. Oh, and the plastic bottles? Forget about it. I have washable and reusable containers at
home.
I once
asked, “What can I do to take care of the earth? I’m only one person!” It only takes one person to be a leader. I get my friends and we pick up garbage from
the neighborhood, or at the park, and while it may not have been a ton of
garbage at one time, it was enough to make a difference. And you and your friends can do that, too. We only have one beautiful earth, and we have
to take care of it and keep it just as God gave it to us. And you know why God gave us such a beautiful
planet? Because God loves you, and your
pal Muley loves you, and I’ll see you real soon.
The following photos were borrowed from internet searches with no recollection where they were found; but, we'll be happy to list proper credits when given them!
What God gave us and what we did to it...
What God gave us and what we did to it...
What God gave us and what we did to it...
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