From inherited faith to living hope
Sylvia Muia
For a long time, being a Christian was more of an identity chosen for me by default, having been born into a Christian family. You start with Sunday school, learn Bible songs, graduate to teens’ church and eventually reach adulthood. It is then, I think, that the real question pops up: Why am I a Christian?
For me, it all came back to how my relationship with Christ held me through some of the toughest parts of life – unemployment, brokenness, heartbreak and illness. Through it all, He was there. Even in the darkest moments, there was joy, as Psalm 16:11 (NIV) says:
‘You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.’
Living in a secular world made this connection deeply relevant and kept me sane practically, but it became much deeper once I began working with A Rocha. It felt like I had been walking through life zoomed in, only seeing what was right in front of me. I cared about the environment, but I had never fully regarded it as God’s creation – never fully zoomed out to recognize the hand of the Creator in every boulder and lake, each curved into its unique shape.
When I worked as an environmental journalist, attending meetings and reading scientific reports, my mind was constantly crippled with anxiety, wondering what we would do once the climate clock ran out. It was a never-ending cycle of bad news. Most of the time, I would look at nature and immediately pick out what was going wrong, becoming a very negative environmentalist.
Nature is calming and beautiful, and it has always been one of the places where I felt closer to God – but my anger blinded me from appreciating it fully.
I recently finished my first year at A Rocha, and I am happy to say that this worry no longer looms over my head. One of the greatest lessons I learned early on was that we cannot care for the world without involving the Creator. Being reminded that the world is God’s, and everything in it, helped lift a burden that had been crushing me. What a relief!
I also have the privilege of being part of the first cohort of the A Rocha Conservation Certificate, alongside amazing people from all over the world – those actively caring for creation and others simply curious about it. One of the theology-based modules explored how God is not only the Creator of the world, but also deeply present within it. In pre-colonial times, many Indigenous communities in Africa and Latin America respected nature and its elements so deeply because of how they reflected God.
Our first encounter with God is through creation, as Romans 1:20 reminds us:
‘For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.’
One of my favourite parts of the Conservation Certificate is the weekly awe and wonder time, where people share both the glorious and wondrous, and the destructive and terrifying parts of creation they experience, whether in New Zealand or Hong Kong or elsewhere. In all of it, we are drawn back to look up to the Creator in reverence and worship, continually amazed by the wonders he orchestrates.
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