I recently had the pleasure of speaking at a college convocation. When I told the Director of Spiritual Life that I would share my creation-care journey and then ask students to work in small groups on a Good Steward Covenant — committing to specific actions they would take in a day, a week, a month, and a year — I could see he was a bit skeptical. No speaker had ever done anything quite like this in a convocation, but he was game.

We stayed like that, just sitting in the tropical moonlight, for a long time. I couldn’t help but compare the peacefulness of the night air with the busyness of our lives back home. So rarely did we have time to stop and think, to discuss the big questions of life. Our conversation rambled from art and music, to books we were reading, to the state of the world.

And then I asked two questions that would change our lives forever.