Sometimes we can get so into the thick of things that we miss the big picture. We get our priorities out of balance—family overwhelms church, or church family; work overwhelms fellowship, or fellowship work; nutritional precision overwhelms enjoyment of God’s good gifts of foods—or vice versa!

With regard to Earth stewardship—fulfilling the mandate for godly dominion—it’s easy to get narrowly focused on either of two balancing tasks: subduing, ruling, tilling, and keeping the Earth (Genesis 1:28; 2:15) on the one hand, or correcting the unbiblical environmentalist movement (1 Thessalonians 5:21; 1 Peter 3:15–16; Jude 3) on the other.

The solution? Not, I think, figuring out what percentage of time to spend on one or the other of any of these tradeoffs. No, not that, because God’s callings on us differ. He calls some to specialize in one thing, others in another.

Rather, the solution is in being a particular kind of person.

Today I was reminded afresh of a beautiful description—put in the form of a resolution—of the kind of person who can be a good Earth steward—or a good spouse, parent, employer, employee, political leader, citizen, whatever. It comes in the words by which the late Dr. Clyde Kilby—long-time English professor at Wheaton College, a dear family friend, namesake of one of my daughters—concluded a lecture in 1976 meant to renew in his students a sense of amazement at what it means to be alive in this world:

• At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

• Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

• I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

• I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

• I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

• I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

• I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

• I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

• I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

• Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.