Before the momentous meeting I attended yesterday I said a lot of goodbyes. The college students who participated in my program were going back to final exams. The older people were returning to their jobs, mostly either in ministries or as college professors.
Thinking About the Future
One of those students, James Wheeler, a senior at Gordon College, will consider numerous possibilities of jobs he could do after he graduates. When he first arrived at COP he told me he was considering working in the area of animal conservation. As he left COP he had job possibilities with the World Wildlife Fund, with an organization that works to preserve rhinos in Zimbabwe, and with something else in Guyana.
I had a fun time getting to know Carolina Franca. She told me her parents both immigrated to the USA from Brazil. She knew YWAM and had seriously considered joining. She had no idea anyone at YWAM was interested in helping people affected by climate-related suffering. By the end of COP she was talking to Ben about the possibility of coming to do a YWAM training in Scotland. In general, she said she was sensing God leading her to get involved in missions.
Dorcas Wakio, a petite dynamo from Kenya, who took to calling me “Bishop,” will go back to her ministry having made a ton of new connections. She’s involved in a variety of programs including providing sanitary supplies for women who can’t afford them, planting trees, and restoring the mangroves that help prevent flooding.
What Ben and I Discussed
And what about me? As I headed toward Dubai one of my main goals was to meet Ben Richards, the climate scientist who works with YWAM in Scotland, and learn more about what could be done in YWAM. It turned out we had even more time together than I expected. We were roommates, for one thing, and we often found ourselves talking together on the hour and a half journey on the metro. From what I had seen of Ben on Zoom calls or on videos of talks he had given, I knew he was a wealth of information. Now, having been around him for a week, I’m amazed at the breadth of his knowledge about everything from the electrical grid to reforestation. A few times on the metro as Ben answered my questions I could tell people who understood some English were leaning slightly forward trying to pick up what he was saying.
One thing we talked about is the idea of starting a training program in YWAM that would give young adults an overview of how they could help vulnerable people affected by extreme heat, water scarcity, drought, flooding, relocation, and health challenges brought by changes in climate. We’re both excited to explore these ideas further with the team Ben works with in Paisley as well as the wider network of people in YWAM interested in this subject.
For me, this kind of planning will initially take up a small part of my time, and I will continue to mostly work in the area of communication in YWAM. But I’m excited about this training idea and I’m looking forward to helping it take shape.
The Blog Goes On
Also, I have a lot more I’d like to tell you from my trip to Dubai. I’d also like to keep thinking about this subject of creation care in general and processing my thoughts by writing. For those reasons I want to keep this blog going for a while. I’m thinking of putting out one article a week. Feel free to hit “unsubscribe” if you would rather not continue to get messages from me. But if you do want to follow along with my thinking, thank you, and please let me know if you have any comments.
On my next blog I plan to respond to one such comment, from a friend who wondered how we can know what the carbon dioxide level was hundreds of thousands of years ago. I asked Ben about that and I’m looking forward to telling you what he said.