Rachel is the Executive Assistant to Dave Bookless, a role she does one day a week. The rest of the time she works for Hope for the Future, supporting UK churches to build relationships with their MP and take political action on climate change. In the not too distant past she studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and is very interested in the philosophical causes of present environmental issues.
A friend this week asked me why I love the sky so much (‘I do mean that question genuinely’, they said). It gave me pause because I hadn’t considered my love of the sky to be overly notable. I also hadn’t actually ever given thought to the reasons why I do, in fact, love the sky.
A friend of mine who has a brother living in Australia recently took the difficult decision never to fly to Australia again. ‘Love hurts’, she commented ruefully. Others will make different choices, for different reasons, but choose we must.
It’s not a word I used much previously, but ‘harrowing’ sums up the experience of the last weeks and months. To my mind it has connotations of deep emotional scarring and agonizing pain; perhaps because a harrow is a farming implement with metal blades, dragged across a field to break up and smooth out the soil.
I walked over and tossed vegetable scraps in the trash with a tinge of guilt at still not having a compost system set up. Then my soul turned to the Lord with arms crossed and heels dug in as if to say, “I can’t care about compost right now” or maybe, more accurately, “I refuse to care when so many people are hurting.”
When Greta Thunberg speaks, the world listens. How is it that a 16-year old Swedish schoolgirl, unknown just over a year ago, has become one of the best-known faces and voices on the planet?
To have dear friends who carry great wisdom is a profound blessing. I seek to glean all I can from every moment we get together. Miranda Harris has poured so much into my heart. Each time we’re together she propels me further on the path towards living into my calling.
It was going to be a good week. But it wasn’t. We were beginning to enjoy our new house and also had our younger son and his family visiting. Then midday Tuesday, the warm Provençal sun spilling over us, we received the appalling news that a terrible car accident in South Africa had taken the lives of our old A Rocha friends Chris and Susanna Naylor and with them Miranda Harris, leaving her husband Peter recovering in hospital.
On Monday 28th October Peter and Miranda Harris, co-founders of A Rocha, and Chris Naylor, A Rocha International CEO, together with his wife Susanna, were involved in an horrific car accident in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Biodiversity is a word you won’t find in the Bible, but the concept is profoundly biblical. As we look through the great themes of the Bible, the pattern is clear: God has a passion for biodiversity that runs from beginning to end.
I remember being 13, and watching David Attenborough walking through a jungle, talking about its beauty and vulnerability, and I remember thinking that I was so glad that people like him were in charge, because he would save the rainforests. It feels as if we have been saving the rainforests for my whole life.
