What Should Christians Do About Endangered Animals? A Question About Calling.

By Katrina Daroff

I am going to put a disclaimer on this right now that I do not have the answer to this question and this title might actually be a little misleading (let's see what I end up writing). I really don't know what God has to say about my responsibility to animals as a part of God's creation, endangered or otherwise. I do have a pretty firm belief that in Genesis 1:28. when God said to "rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground," that He did not just intend for us to have power over them but was giving us a responsibility to them. That is a thought process that I cannot fully back with scripture except that I have found in 36 years of study that whenever God has given someone power and authority over someone, he has also given them responsibility to them. I will probably have to explore that more at some point. First, I have a point to make and a story to tell.

When I was growing up in the 1990s, girls could be pretty easily divided into a couple of subsets of interests. Fashion Girls. Sports Girls. Art Girls. Smart Girls. Don’t believe me? Watch any episode of the Babysitters Club or any other television show about a group of girls who were friends but each had to have their own distinct personality. Amongst those archetypes were the animal girls. There was also a subset of animal girls that were specifically horse girls and there were lines in the sand between the different animal girls but we really don’t have time to get that deep into the lore right now.

I was an animal girl.

I mean… in reality, I was every type of girl, as we all are, because we are not archetypes bound to one singular interest, but for the intent of this particular question and story, we will say I was an animal girl.

In fact, I was enough of an animal girl that in late elementary school… or maybe early middle school, when I announced that I wanted to be a missionary doctor when I grew up my mom gently suggested that maybe I would prefer to be a missionary veterinarian because I really cared about animals. Thank God I did not actually pursue either option because people would have died… in either scenario.

The thing is though, at that time there was not really a place in the church for a girl to say, “I love animals and I want to pursue a career in animal conservation as a part of God’s calling in my life.” This was due to a lot of factors. Partly because animal conservation was taught with a heavy emphasis on evolution and the fact that humanity was to blame for everything. In modern vernacular a lot of people in the church would have called would have called animal conservation too woke to be God’s calling on your life. Please remember, it was the 90s, at that same time people were literally freaking out that computers were going to stop working and society would come crashing to a halt because the date was going to change from 1999 to 2000. Anyway, caring for animals could not be your calling from God, unless you were going to be a vet and help people in third world countries care for their livestock and that was just the way it was. That is probably why I don’t know how to incorporate so many of the loves and cares that God has given me into serving Him. And why that is a question that has haunted me particularly over the last few weeks.

You see, a few weeks ago I woke up, opened up Instagram and had to see with my own two eyes a video of two whales in a tank in an abandoned marine park that appeared to be dead and then, in a heart wrenching twist of narrative, started performing for the drone that was filming them. The 90s animal girl within me awoke like Lazarus being called out of the grave by Christ himself. I took that so personally that I have read every article and Reddit post on the internet about it trying to figure out what to do and half of my conversations have started the phrase, “you know about the whales in France, right?” Or “I think I know what to do about the whales in France.” (I actually don’t know what to do about the whales in France. My last idea involved making a National Geographic documentary.) I’ll be honest, I am not concerned with every whale in the world but those two whales hit my heart so hard it was as if I was Frodo Baggins and Galadriel was standing before me saying “this task was appointed to you. If you do not find a way, no one will.”

I am not really here to talk about the whales in France. Or about endangered animals. Or growing up an animal girl in the 90s. Those are just puzzle pieces of who I am and my experience of God’s calling in my life. This is not the first time that something has landed on my heart so hard that it has become my personal responsibility in my mind. That I have looked at it and said, “the shire is burning, so I will go to Mordor.” Because of that, I know it is something that God is asking me to care about, even if it is not something that makes sense to anyone else or something I know I will probably fail at and won’t understand why I was asked to do it when it was a doomed to failure from the start.

I’m reminded of the story of Mary of Bethany when she anointed Jesus with perfume that cost a year’s wages. A task that did not make sense, probably even to her, and that was considered unacceptable by even Jesus’ disciples because it did not fit within their view of what serving God looked like, but it still weighed so heavily on Mary’s heart that she did it. It mattered whether or not she or anyone else knew why.

I have personally struggled with calling from God lately and questioning if I got it wrong because the task I was asked to do failed. I failed. Now I look at another impossible task that I feel God placing on my heart; a task that I have no resources or idea of how to accomplish it and I question why God would ask this of me, if God is even asking it of me, when I can only see it ending in another failure. But God does not ask for us to understand and does not ask that we do things that others understand. God asks us to trust and follow him. And I think that sometimes God asks us to do one thing because it puts us in a place to do something else that we don’t even realize was the whole point.

In answer to the misleading question in my title, I don’t know what we as Christians are supposed to do about endangered animals. What I do know it that when God puts something on our heart or calls us to do something, even something that makes no sense or we don’t know how to do or that others say we should not be worried about that we should still do it. Just like Peter put his fishing net over the other side of the boat when Jesus asked him to even though he knew it would do no good. Just like Mary anointed Jesus even when Jesus’ own disciples questioned what she was doing. So don’t ignore the things that weigh heavy on your heart.