2. Constant change. Every ecosystem is in flux, slowly or rapidly.
Tomorrow is different from today and yesterday, even if minutely. This gives rise to history.
Physical fact: All living creatures have a life cycle. Meanwhile the inert parts of creation also change due to time, weather and the action of living things. Tomorrow that beautiful mountain or seacoast will be slightly different.
Spiritual fact: As part of the created order, humans are constantly changing spiritually. Change may be gradual or sudden; perceptible or not. This fact derives from God himself, Triune Creator, who in one sense is changeless but yet is dynamic, full of transformative energy.
Spiritual-physical fact: We’re always changing both physically and spiritually—interactively between body, mind, spirit, will, other people, earth and its atmosphere and its creatures. Food or lack thereof affects your spirit as well as the earth and its creatures, from which food comes. Et cetera. This necessarily shapes how we understand “holistic” spirituality, communit and ministry.
3. Input > Throughput > Output
To be alive and thrive, every being and every ecosystem requires ongoing energy input.
The energy is processed, nourishing or otherwise affecting the organism or system (throughput). Work and waste result: always there is output.
Physical fact: Every living thing requires continuing energy inputs: food, water, air, solar energy (indirectly, if not directly). Energy is absorbed, used and discharged in some form. (Jesus commented on this.)
Spiritual fact: The same is true spiritually. Spiritual life also requires input, grows (or not) by throughput and produces output in ways healthy, unhealthy, destructive or innocuous. (Jesus commented on this, also.)
Spiritual-physical fact: All dimensions of our lives are constantly shaped by input, throughput and output, physically and spiritually—which means (among other things) economically, aesthetically, emotionally, socially and so on. A constant cycle: physical and spiritual inputs, throughputs, and outputs interacting.
