Monday, February 18, 2008

Serve God, Save the Planet



Usually, I start the week with a truncated overview of sunday night's h2o message. But today is different. This week kicks off our Another World Is Possible series of events. So, it might be a little while before you see a blog about last nights h2o (not too long though).

Right now I would just like to pass some information along to you about an event happening on campus tonight. Dr. J. Matthew Sleeth, a former student at WVU as well as a former chief of staff and director of ER at a major hospital will be coming to Morgantown tonight to speak at Eiesland Hall. Dr. Sleeth also wrote a book in recent months called Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, and it's a book I highly recommend.

Dr. Sleeth's story is a very interesting one. During his years at the hospital, he noticed an exponential increase in environmentally related illnesses. Illnesses like cancer and asthma were on the rise. Actually he said before 1880, there had never been a documented case of asthma. Can you believe that? He also noticed that his lifestyle was very out of tune with good stewardship of God's creation. So one of the first things he did was downsize his home. He, his wife, and two kids moved into a house the size of their garage. Before people get too shocked and concerned, he jokes about it and says, "Have you ever seen a doctor's garage?"

It was his conviction that God wanted him to help with root cause of many of the higher incidence of environmentally related illnesses, and that precipitated a career change for him. And now he's coming to wvu. He'll be in Eiesland tonight at 8PM, and it would be great if you could make it to the event. If you can't make it to the event, take a minute and pray for the folks who are coming, that God will use this event to bring the healing message of the gospel and God's concern for all of creation into the world.

3 comments:

Pam Swope said...

I ordered his book. Looking forward to reading it.

Alise said...

Is there a podcast/recording of last night's event? Part of being eco-friendly here is trying not to drive from Fairmont to Morgantown for all of this weeks events. ;-D

Anonymous said...

Hi, my name is Dustin and I work with a Christian environmental organization called Christians in Conservation: A Rocha USA. I saw your post about the book "Serve God, Save the Planet”, and I thought that you might like to know that our organization sponsors Dr. Sleeth as a "creation care evangelist." We would love for you to check us out at our website, en.arocha.org/usa. You might also be interested in the website for Dr. Sleeth's book, www.servegodsavetheplanet.org.