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The Christian Working Woman, began in 1984 to challenge workplace Christians to see their jobs as assignments from God, not just a place to earn a living. And the way we live on those jobs has a greater impact for the Gospel than anything else.
I’m taking a phrase from the Boy Scouts and applying it to our lives. It is: Leave it better than you found it. I’ve talked about leaving our jobs better than we found them and leaving our relationships better than we found them.
Now let’s think about leaving our environment better than we found it. There’s a lot of concern about what’s happening to our environment, and we should be good stewards of God’s universe, that’s for sure. Which means we recycle as much as possible and do whatever we can to make our physical world better than we found it.
Then there’s our more personal environment: our living space and our working space. I have a friend who decided she could do something for the environment. She got tired of how messy and unclean public washrooms tend to be. So, she decided that she would try to leave any washroom she used better than she found it. When she told me what she was doing, I realized I had never even thought of taking that kind of responsibility—to leave a public space better than I found it. But if we all did that, we’d live in cleaner, nicer environments, wouldn’t we? Our streets and roadways wouldn’t be cluttered with trash.
Someone has said that cleanliness is next to godliness, and while I’m not sure that can be supported biblically, there’s no doubt that we should care about cleanliness for ourselves and for others. So, why don’t we just decide to leave our environments—wherever they may be—better than we found them.