Valentines Day has become a rather over commercialized celebration of individual romantic love. This year we would like to encourage you to celebrate Earthkeepers day – love your Earth day!
With Valentine’s Day falling very early in spring in the northern hemisphere, it is often associated with the advent of spring. In Slovenia, St Valentine, or Zdravko, was considered to be one of the saints of spring and good health, and the patron of beekeepers and pilgrims. A proverb says that St Valentine “brings the keys of roots”, with plants and flowers starting to grow on this day.
It is with this in mind that we would like to turn Valentine’s Day into a day that honours and shows love for the Earth, just like St Valentine did. We would like to see it as a day in which we can all feel a deep sense of connection and love for Creation. So we invite you to unite in prayer, creative fun and play with faith communities across Southern Africa and celebrate all life around us.
We live in a time where a greater ecological awareness is needed and thus we extend the challenge to all faith communities to replace the consumerism of this weekend with a spiritual and pragmatic honouring of this day as keepers of the earth to express awe, respect and love for the sanctity of all life.
What about having a “Practical picnic” with your loved ones on this day. http://safcei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/EKD-additional-event_practical-picnic.pdf
Today’s Task:
Think about how your church is showing LOVE for the environment? Our theme for this week of our Carbon Fast is food. How does your church cater? Where do you buy your food, is it local or shipped in from far away. Do you use free range chicken or factory farmed? What happens to leftover food? Do you use Styrofoam or do you wash up?
A prayer to say at your church
Creator God, we gather in this sanctuary to praise and honour You, yet there are many things that we do in caring for this space that destroy Your creation and make life easier for us in this place, but do not bring honour and glory to You as Creator. Help us to raise the necessary motivation and commitment to make radical changes in our mode of thinking and our actions to avoid further damages to the environment and the earth that sustains us. Help us to honour in every possible way that we can, the sanctity of all life and You, Lord God, as the ultimate giver and sustainer of all that lives on earth. Amen