by Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
Imagine yourself on the beach of Lake Michigan. The sand is a hot stove and squeaking beneath your shoes as you haul your chair, umbrella and a cooler with snacks from the parking lot down toward the water’s edge. Squinting your eyes, you aim for prime real estate and when you finally reach it, you stake your claim with a beach camp. As you settle into your comfortable chair with your cold beverage close at hand, you smile, because the view of the lake is absolutely magnificent. The waves are lapping the shore like a thirsty cat, the seagulls are busy choreographing a new flight dance overhead, and the sapphire sky is decorated with clouds that glide past in a white cotton candy parade. It is a perfect picture, except…. for that 2.5 centimeter piece of orange plastic that is now catching your eye by the shore, and that white tine of a plastic fork that is poking up from the sand near the edge of your cooler. ….And the green bottle top that gleams like a piece of fake jade over to your left. Once you start noticing a few of the bits and brac of plastic at the beach, you will start to see them everywhere. Cigarette butts and food wrappers, broken toys and plastic labels in various stages of splintering and splitting down into micro plastic particles so that they can be ingested by the 40 million humans who use the Great Lakes as our shared water supply. We, the people who live and work around the Great Lakes, we have carelessly tossed our trash and it has floated into our coffee cups, our baby bottles and beer bottles. Microplastics are not just in the delicious fish that we consume from our inland freshwater sea; through our drinking water, those plastic particles are now found in all our bodies. But we not only have polluted this beautiful gift from God, we waste it too.
The Great Lakes are the largest freshwater system in the world. By contrast, over 703 million people in the world lack access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s 1 in 10 of the people on the planet. Women and girls around the world spend an estimated 200 million hours carrying water, walking 6 kilometers (about 3.7 miles) every single day to haul 40 pounds of water to their homes. Forty pounds of water is about five gallons. –Barely enough to cover up our feet in our 70 gallon bathtubs. We waste far more than five gallons of water every time we leave our faucets running and thoughtlessly pour our precious Great Lakes water into the sewer.
As followers of Jesus Christ, most of us have been baptized. Perhaps we were even baptized with or in these same waters from the Great Lakes. While we are happy to let the waters of baptism symbolize the work of Christ cleansing our souls, we have not lived into our commitment to be disciples of Jesus and be the good stewards of this wonderful gift of the lakes we are so fortunate to live by. Are we the biggest of hypocrites when we baptize with water which we call purifying when we have contaminated it with our refuse? Are we actually living into our baptisms when our neighbors do not have enough safe water to drink? As created beings made up of 60 percent of water, when will we realize that adequate amounts of clean water is absolutely essential for our health and for the life of all beings?
This summer, as we enjoy the beach, relax in a bath or a hot tub and drink our favorite cold beverages on a sweltering day, let us all expand our efforts of stewardship of this precious and essential gift of water. Our very lives and our souls depend upon it.
Published in the Rockford Squire Newspaper, July 4th, 2024
