Green Christian

I am having trouble finding time to do this blogging thing. Oh well, more time will come.

This post is about me being a Christian who believes in living green! Living green is not typically considered a Christian platform, but I think it should be. It is, of course, not the most important issue out there. However, I believe it does have its place. In order for me to live "green", and I think this holds true for most people, three things have to occur.

Being green has to be:
1. Relatively easy
2. Inexpensive
3. Not time consuming

First why should you live ecologically responsible? First, I believe it is a Biblical concept. We are told many times to be good stewards of what we are given. Living green is a great way to save money and to make things last longer. We are also given the example of not wasting resources - such as the loaves and fishes. I am not talking about rinsing meat trays here, just doing simple things like using table scraps for a compost pile. Also, living green can be better for your health as many man made chemicals have been proven to be harmful to our bodies.

Some of the ways that I live green are recycling, gardening, and composting. I also hang my clothes on the line when possible and make things myself. You are probably thinking that those things don't sound very easy and some of them aren't but they can be made easy.

Recycling: I do this a lot more than I used to, of course my kids are bigger than they used to be. We have a small house but I still found room for two receptacles. One is for paper products and the other is for glass, plastic and metal. I have the receptacles marked for the kids. We have a regular trash can in the kitchen. I instructed my kids on what can go in each and that cans and bottles have to be rinsed and compressed. I was pleasantly surprised at how good at it they are. We have only had a couple of incidents of yucky trash going in the recycling- and those were by my dear husband! I buy the recycling bags at the local center for .25 cents each. I am paying for not having to sort my recycling, I just drop the bags off. You could save even more money by sorting your own. We are still saving money though because having our dumpster dumped is lots more expensive. The receptacles are tucked neatly away in the laundry area. I also keep an empty storage box without a lid under my sink so I can rinse things and throw them under there.

Gardening is my passion. This is easy for me, but it is labor intensive. There are ways to grow a lot of food without a lot of work. You could check out the book, Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. I incorporate food composting with this love. Growing my own food saves resources and is healthier for my family. We have a small garden and it produces enough food for us and allows me the pleasure of giving lots away to family and friends. I keep a compost bucket near the sink and put all produce peels and scraps in it. However, I also put eggshells, paper from egg carton tops (torn into small pieces - I save the bottoms to start seeds in the house), expired grains, and basically any other non-processed foods that the dogs won't get into. Every couple of days I take it out to my pile. Composting is a whole other subject though.

If I can make something myself less expensively and without killing a whole bunch of time I am game. I just recently started making my own laundry detergent. It is fairly simple and only costs about a penny a load. Most importantly though, it works. It is made of mostly natural ingredients and I feel good about using it on my family's clothes. I make most of my own cleansers out of vinegar. Recently, because of Georgia's health issues I have had to use a few stronger things, but for the most part vinegar is good for your family and the environment and it works. I don't make everything or even most things myself, but everything that I make from scratch makes a difference.

Other little things you can do: use tips to make your car more fuel efficient, buy energy efficient appliances, buy things in recycled packaging, buy from farmers markets or from local farmers, buy used... There are many more and lest you think I am some kind of super greenie there is a lot that I don't do. I don't buy $8 toilet paper from the local health food store. I have paper towels - but I am pretty stingy with them and I find if I buy those select-a-size ones they go twice as far. I am really bad to run the water while I wash dishes or brush my teeth - working on that one. I have potato chips in my house and I don't wash ziplock bags. I can't stand that filmy feeling they have. I do have energy efficient bulbs, but I don't always turn them off when I could. I could go on and on about what I could do better, but the point is I am doing something and I am teaching my kids to do something. I am teaching them that we are being good stewards - not saving the world - that is Jesus' job.

That Day Part III

We survived that first night - I don't know how. I don't remember anything after my sobbing fit. The next morning we met who would become a very important person in our family - Dr. Saylors. He was to be Georgia's hemoc doctor and he seemed dry and negative to the bone. We would later learn that this was not true, but at the time he sure seemed that way. He gave us the facts: her body was full of leukemia and her blood needed to be cleaned. Yes, cleaned. She was to begin apheresis in a few hours. A process that slowly cycles the blood out of the body and through a machine that pulls the leukemia out - which is really just sick white cells. Sounded barbaric to me. I remember my mom telling me that she thought it sounded like a miracle. However, this process was just a starting place because Georgia had so much leukemia it wasn't safe to immediately give her chemo. All of the killed cells have to go somewhere and that was just too many dead cells at once. So we were taken down the hall to "apheresis". There were three other children in the room hooked up to huge machines with blood running in one side of a reel and back out another. I was terrified of this machine but could not show it because at this point Georgia was beyond terrified. However painful the process sounded, it was actually quite simple. They hooked the machine up to her iv and she just laid there. It did take four hours though.

At some point she had begun to look sick. She was very pale, almost green and very weak. She wasn't talking to anyone much. When the apheresis was complete we were shown the bags of sludge that came out of her blood. It was terrifying! I don't know how her blood continued to be pumped through her body. What if I hadn't taken her to the doctor when I did? I've always been the type that rarely goes to the doctor or takes my kids there. It's hard to say what was going through my mind at this time but at some point I had begun to ask myself HOW. How did this happen? Where did it come from? Is it something I fed her, something I did when I was pregnant, something in our environment? Of course the doctors said no to all of this, but to this day I wonder.

That second night in the hospital Georgia awoke screaming "momma" over and over. Screaming. I never felt so useless and scared in my life. I literally wanted to run screaming into the night, or bash my head into the wall until the pain of hearing your baby scream was gone. I wanted to run, and I know that Scott felt the same way, but he handled it in usual quiet way. The staff tried several pain killers until eventually they gave her morphine and that allowed her to sleep the rest of the night. When she finally fell asleep, Scott and I just sat and cried. Never had either one of us known such pain.

The next six days went by as slow as one can imagine, but they are a blurr in my mind. They were a so many tests and procedures and a couple surgeries. One surgery to place a temporary line in her leg and another to place a long term port in her chest. There were so many tears, from Scott and I, and from Georgia. There was fear and frustration. There was confusion as new people came into our lives everyday. New people who wanted to do new things to our precious little girl. They spoke in terms that we did not understand - neutrophils, central lines, vincristine... But something else began to happen over those 8 days, I began to find my faith. It had never left, I just couldn't see it for the doubt.

I liken faith and doubt to two trees planted side by side. When the sun comes up over the trees, the shadow of the doubt tree covers the faith tree. The faith tree is still there it is just covered by the shadow of doubt. The bigger your doubt tree the longer it takes for the shadow to come off your faith. You see I had the faith to believe that this disease would not take our baby, I was just overwhelmed by the shadow of circumstances. God had given us Georgia, she was a perfect gift asked for and received from God Almighty. She would live. My faith tree grew, and the shadow pulled back. My faith is built on knowing, knowing my God, knowing His goodness and mercy, knowing that He loves me and loves Georgia even more than I do - which is unfathomable. I began to remember God's love for me, for Scott. for Georgia. I began to recall His promises. And then...I was ready to fight. The devil would not take my baby. She was and is a gift from God, sent to do wonderful, amazing things with her life and that would not be changed by the words of man or the physical circumstances of her body.

We were given a diagnosis. Acute lymphocytic leukemia. A very treatable form of leukemia. She will endure almost 3 years of treatment, but I now believe that she is already healed by the blood of Jesus, we just have to wait for the doctors to discover this same truth. It's been 8 months since her diagnosis today. We have had good days and really, really bad days. I have had moments when the shadow of doubt covered my faith again. However, I always find it again. I have learned that my baby girl is tough beyond compare. I have learned that I can handle things that I never dreamed possible. I have learned that there is a whole community out there of families fighting childhood cancer bravely. Some have lost the battle, some are just beginning, but they all fight bravely. I still mourn for the days that the devil has taken from my baby - days of pain and sleeping all the time. I know that God will restore her body completely and give her days full of joy.