As my wife and I take inventory of our lives (literally and figuratively), we have decided to start being a little more green. We as Americans are, as a whole, a very wasteful bunch. Nationwide, there is a growing awareness of “going green,” being more environmentally minded, and basically taking care of our planet.

As Christians, Hannah and I cannot find any place in the BIble where God said it was O.K. to trash the Earth and treat it like a giant garbage dump. Instead, he told us to take care of the place.

Anyway, to that end, Hannah and I decided that one small step we can make is to start using reusable cloth bags when we go to the store. We do most of our grocery shopping at Aldi and I was in line the other day picking up some stuff for Makayla’s birthday party when I saw that Aldi was selling eco-friendly reusable bags. They had one in the checkout line and I asked how much they were — $1.99 — not bad, and the bag was pretty big. I tugged on the seams and saw they were constructed pretty well, too. So I thought the one I had been looking at was for sale, so I put it with my stuff. The clerk politely pointed me to the location of the bags and said the one I was looking at was for display.

Ah, ok. So I put the display back and bent down to get one. And was instantly struck with a dose of irony:

Yep, Aldi’s eco-friendly canvas bags come packaged, for no apparent reason, inside a plastic bag. I picked the bag up and chuckled as I put it with my items. “Only in America,” I said, “would a store sell an environmentally friendly bag packaged in a plastic one.” The clerk laughed because she had never noticed and we concluded that there was no reason for the canvas bag to be in a plastic bag. Kinda defeats the purpose a bit.