Stroll for Your Soul Day 16

An online resource adapted and used with permission from prayerbanch.ca
Weather Report  Unpredictable - Climate Change
Todays Weather 
Year on year weather records are being broken all over the globe. News headlines say things like, ‘The Warmest Year on Record Since Records Began‘ followed by the same headline the following year. Other common global headlines are 'Once in Two Hundred year Flood’ followed immediately by another ‘Once in Two Hundred Year Flood’ the same week or month. We’re left scratching our heads as to how many two hundred year floods we can expect to experience in our lifetime. Droughts, tornadoes, heat waves, fires, snow storms, tropical storms, freezing temperatures… check the weather report -  all these things are happening in a place near us.
Our years of experience living with weather have given us an inner prediction tool to know what weather to expect in certain months, what clothes we’ll wear in a season, what layers we’ll have on the bed at night, what time of day we’ll need to heat a room or when the right weekend will be to plan a camping trip.
All this inner knowledge is being swept aside by rapidly increasing climate change bringing unpredictable, unexpected and extreme weather. 

Weather with You 
If we shut our eyes and turn our backs can we pretend that climate change is a problem for someone else to fix?
If we talk louder and faster and use a lot of words and make promises to change can we pat ourselves on the back for doing our bit?
If we take personal measures to combat our own contributions to climate change but compare this to the efforts of corporations and countries, can we give up because we won’t make enough of a difference personally?
The challenges of climate change are with us now. The issues are unavoidable and the impact is happening at speed.  It’s confronting and hard. 
Our personal creation responsibilities can feel overwhelming.  For sure, there are giants in our world who can make a massively big difference, and will need to if we are going to turn our world around. However we cannot underestimate the power of every tiny decision made by millions of individual people who care about God’s world.  
Jesus talked often of little things; a small amount of yeast, a pinch of salt, a coin, a child’s lunch, a mustard seed. Consider what tiny steps you have been taking and what your next tiny step might be in caring for creation and accepting your creation responsibilities.
I invite you to pray this prayer written and read by James Applebym, a COP26 campaigner from the Methodist Church UK. 
A prayer for an end to climate change