I once talked to a young druid at Paganfest. He'd been practicing druidism for a decade or more. His father was buddhist and his mother, he told me, was christian. I asked him what he found in druidism that appealed to him so. "Harmony with nature," he replied. "Nature has almost no one to defend her, and druids are her guardians." He wore a long, black robe and sold staffs which he whittled and ornamented from, as he pointed out, "already dead" forest material. We were at Paganfest peddling tie-dye. Next he flipped my question on me: "What do you find in being a christian?" I wasn't expecting the question; my subject had suddenly become the scientist. I had rather anticipated demonstrating to him that, whatever his answer, my God would not only put his talents and interests to good use, but bring them to completion. I was working off of the presupposition that no religion has anything good to offer which cannot also be found in serving Christ, and I still believe that to be true. We are broken and incomplete fragments of what He intended for us to be, prior to our acquiescing to His perfecting hands. In God's kingdom there is a place for environmentalists and capitalists, vegans and ranchers, poets and warriors. To cast myself upon God's mercy, His Son Jesus Christ, is not, I have been pleased to discover, to be brainwashed and assimilated. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (1 Cor 5:17a) but that doesn't mean God threw all the old pieces away. Some of them were quite salvageable, and He doesn't like waste. I have been a dirty, outdoorish, guitar-playing daydreamer both out of His beautiful will and in the dead center of it. Nevertheless, "the old has gone, the new has come!"