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By Robert King, Indianapolis Star

Dr. Matthew Sleeth was living large as an emergency room physician and chief of staff at a hospital — with all the financial blessings that sounds like it might entail — when he decided he had to give it all up to save one patient whose case superceded all others.

The Earth.

Sleeth came to this conclusion after it dawned on him that he was seeing a lot of young woman with breast cancer. When he started looking at cancer rates in young people, he noticed that they were increasing. The same was true of other problems — asthma, autism and autoimmune deficiencies, to name a few. The more he looked into the research, the more convinced he became that we were killing the Earth. And the Earth was starting to kill us.

But he didn’t know what to do.

He began a spiritual search that lead him from no faith to Christianity. And in the words of the Bible he saw that nature — from the Tree of Life in Eden to the Tree of Life in the heaven of Revelation — was a common theme.

And he found a calling — to show others that caring for the Earth is not just a hip, trendy thing to do. It is the Biblical thing to do.

Sleeth, author of “Serve God Save the Planet”, will bring his message of Biblical greenness to Indianapolis this weekend for a series of appearances at the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Sleeth points out that God’s first command to man in the Bible (Gen. 2:15) was to tend the garden and keep it. In an interview with me Monday, Sleeth said, “There’s no expiration date on that command.”

As “new” as green theology sounds to us today, Sleeth said it was once an essential aspect of the Christian faith. When America was still an agrarian society, dependent on the land for survival, it was not uncommon for people in church to pray for rain and relief from drought. And there was an understanding among the faithful about the importance of stewardship of the land. Somewhere in the wake of Industrial Revolution and our ability to create cities in deserts we forgot. Sleeth is trying to remind us.

He has become a full-time attending physician for the planet.

[Read the original article]

 

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