I'm An Animal Advocate, and God Cares About What I Do

As I explored and fought for the cries of my heart and championed for the causes that torched me, evangelicals cried back,

"God doesn't care about these things, or at least not as much as you."

I find the latter part of that sentence more infuriating, because I can handle someone who disagrees with me better than I can fathom how someone thinks that I care too much. As if God cares only a little bit about these things, and I need to measure out my care to more "appropriate" causes. The one most frequently cited to me as better than a career in animal welfare is orphan care. I suppose because, if I'm a woman who wants to help dependent and homeless creatures, I should be helping human ones full time and animals only a little bit or not at all.

I have a feeling if I worked a regular 9-5 as a job and devoted a lot of free time to church and the other "approved" causes, no one would blink an eye. But because I dare to say that the full-time work I do for animals is my holy vocation, I am accused of having disordered priorities.

These people have figured out that God cares a lot about certain things, and not very much or not at all about others. It's time to stop listening to people who are trying to win the world to their own miniaturized human-gospel that they created on their own fallible shoulders, a lesser gospel that insists God cares only about certain "higher" things (humans specifically, which betrays a severely egotistical myopia), and not everything that was lovingly created from the Divine Being and called good.

Which to me, is simply absurd. Especially considering that all of these issues are interconnected. We compartmentalize the work that's to be done for the cause of good in this world, missing the fact that what we do for one part of God's creation--be it humans, animals or trees--impacts the rest of that creation, often times in ways we never would have imagined.

God cares about all things, at all times, more than any human ever could. To do anything less would be to betray Divine character.