Life is like a buffet, it is abundant. If you have been to a buffet, no matter how plenty and limitless the food is, you can only eat so much. Our stomach can only digest so much. It varies of course between people. When you have eaten enough, your body will tell you to stop. You will probably experience tightness in your stomach, shortness of breath, nausea or even dizziness. When you experience this, it is actually too late. When your body experiences threshold level, it sends signals to your brain to stop. Your brain takes time to respond. The lag, which is the equivalent to the excess food that you’ve taken, can lead to high blood, hypertension or even heart attack.
I believe God designed life to be abundant for us to enjoy it. But He also placed a built-in regulation mechanism everywhere to maintain balance. Maintaining balance is elusive but should never be ignored when we look at the world in general and in human life.
The World
God made the plants, birds, insects, wild animals, hills, valleys, air and human beings and placed them in one planet to coexist. In Genesis 2: 15,
Then the LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
The story of the Fall of Man tells us about our greed. There are probably a million trees in the Garden of Eden, A MILLION TREES, yet we still ate the fruit of that one tree, ONE TREE, God forbade us. Look at what we are doing now. There are literally thousands of varieties of plants and fruits that we can eat. There are tons of fish and rice that we can make. Yet there are people who eat cockroaches, snakes, monkeys and bats. This virus that is currently rampaging the whole world came from bats. God made bats look scary and hid them in the darkest corners of the world to tell us – YOU SHOULD NOT EAT THEM. Yet we ate them. So now this is what is happening, “for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
This is the built-in regulation mechanism of the world in action and we are paying the price for it.
Bullying is a hot topic nowadays in school. As the dominant species in this planet, we are acting like bullies. Not because we are more intelligent and higher in intuition doesn’t give us the right to impose our will to everything in this world. We separate the baby cows from their mothers the moment they are born and put them in cages, disregarding the cry of the mother without remorse. We pollute the air to create toys for our enjoyment. We destroy forests and cut the trees that serve as homes of several species of birds, to make our coffee table. The thing that bothers me is that we are all part of this. Human beings have built systems that integrate this inhumane and disrespectful acts.
If we don’t clean up our acts together, the world will always self regulate and the price could be greater.
It is our greed that is killing us. This pandemic is telling us that the world can exist without us humans and grimly it seems it is better off without us. As the dominant species, we need to be RESPONSIBLE in taking care of this planet. There are currently 7.5 billion people in the world. The population is increasing at an alarming rate of 7 to 8% per year. The emphasis on nurturing essential skills like respect, responsibility, and self-control has never been more urgent than this time.
Fortunately, there is still time. We still have our chance to make this right and to be better stewards of the world.
(Part 2 soon.)
Ern Ynion 