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Earth Day

Written by Wes

Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Sometimes things just seem to fall into place. The week after Easter my wife and I had a couple of days home without the kids, which gave her a chance to take a walk with a friend of ours who has been part of our congregation for a year (and a friend for longer) - but lately has been identifying with Jesus more and more. While on their walk my wife and our friend strolled down by the Deleware river and passed a small park and a "beach" where kids like to skip stones. It was a bit of a pig-sty, worse than usual (we have to be careful skipping stones because of all the broken glass on the rocks), and our friend said, "You know our church ought to come down here and clean this up."

I'm not sure who put 2 and 2 together, but the fact that Earth Day was coming up quickly set up a day to get people together and do the clean-up, Sunday April 22. We didn't get a chance to push the date with the congregation, but my wife and our friend figured it would be great even if we were the only people to show up. It turns out that two other gentlemen from Central Baptist showed up (and actually beat us there) - appropriately, they both work for the EPA!

Here's what the beach looked like, pre-cleanup

Then we had this nasty Noreaster, and debris from the river got deposited at the high water mark for some significant portions of the river walk - the park was one of the worst-hit locations. While it was too big of a job to clean up the whole river-walk, we did do some significant cleaning near the beach area. In fact, up to today it remains the only part of the debris path that has been touched by some clean-up work.

I know we've probably gotten our reward now, but it was nice to be able to put Psalm 24:1 to work this past Sunday, " The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it (TNIV)." Our kids seemed to be happy that our church was helping other people, and at least one person familiar with Central Baptist seemed genuinel touched that we were taking time out to help out the communit y.

What surprised me is how many of the people who were out enjoying the river walk didn't make eye-contact with us. It wasn't surprising that a bunch of people didn't suddenly go, "What a great idea!" and join us - but not even looking at us was a bit weird.

Oh well, it was a fun day.

This is the small park, we still need to rake it.

Look Ma, Grass!

The kids cleaned, and then skipped rocks...

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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 24 April 2007 )

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