Please add value and do no harm
It is your stewardship duty to add value and give life.
What is it with people who borrow things and return them worse for wear? Or worse, they fail to return them altogether?
Many years ago, I loaned a book to a friend. She promised to return it in a few weeks. Months later, when I kept reminding her, she feigned forgetfulness. Almost a year later, she finally returned the book. With the cover and a few pages missing. After that experience, I stopped lending books to friends. No matter how many promises of “I’ll have it back in no time!” one made.
Why is it that we fail to take care of other people’s things, be they books, homes or their hearts? What evil inclination gives us the idea that it is alright to go roughshod over someone else’s possessions?
If you accept the idea that we come into this world with nothing and leave it with nothing, then seeing yourself as a steward makes sense.
Even the possessions we acquire in our lifetime, we ‘hold’ for a brief moment. We can’t take anything with us. However, in the time that we ‘hold’ our bodies, our life, children, relationships, careers, experiences and property, we should endeavour to return them in much better shape than the book I lent out. Hopefully, we can say that we did our best to enrich the lives of others. That we did not intentionally set out to break or damage our children. But where damage was done, we did our best to make amends.
If you take that a little further, and in light of World Water Day, which was commemorated on March 22, how do we get away with polluting the environment, dumping toxic waste into lakes and rivers, stealing as it were, from our children?
It’s a pity that our children will never know the many lakes and streams in which we once swum and played. Should they attempt to do so, they are likely to come away with a waterborne disease.
How will posterity judge us for destroying that which we were supposed to hold in trust for future generations?
A story is told in the Bible about a man going away on a long trip and giving his three servants some cash ‘to hold’ in trust. When he returns, he finds two of them traded with the cash and made healthy returns. However, the ungrateful one digs a hole to hide the silver. When his master returns, he simply returns what he was given. His master reprimands and punishes him for what he calls treachery.
Read: When enough is enough
Perhaps therein lies the greatest purpose of our lives. To keep in trust and add value. So that when we return to sender, we can show that we did not leave things as we found them, or in a worse state. Rather that this cruel world was a little less so because we sojourned here. That perhaps, the lakes and rivers were a little cleaner.
As I write this, it is raining. The water that pounds my window and flows downhill to the nearby rivers will eventually wind up in the ocean. It’s the cycle of life, and as water returns to its source, so too will we. Even water understands its purpose and will along the way irrigate a farm or garden.
In some instances, it may cause damage but the net value of water is usually life giving. Take a good hard look at your life, body, relationships and possessions. It is your stewardship duty to add value and give life.
