Off to Mom and Dad’s

“It is required of stewards that they be found faithful.”

If you ever rise to the spiritual heights of the apostle Paul — and I have lately come to the conclusion that I am unlikely to manage that — you will be nothing more than a servant and a steward. That is the very best you and I may aspire to in the Christian life, and our efforts to remain conscious of the reality that everything we have been given has been temporarily entrusted to us by God are a mark of growing maturity in Christ.

I was talking to my son yesterday about plans to head down to “Mom and Dad’s” later in the week for an overnight. That’s how I thought of their home for over three decades after I moved out of it, and that’s how I instinctively refer to it today. I have to remind myself over and over that it’s not Dad’s. For one, Dad is gone, and he’s not coming back until he returns to earth in the vanguard of his glorious Lord. More importantly, that home never was Dad’s. When Dad was here, he didn’t think of the property to which he held legal title as his own, and he would have corrected me before I could correct myself.

It wasn’t Dad’s, it was the Lord’s. For that matter, it’s not Mom’s now. They have merely been holding the goods for someone else, passing them on with growing enthusiasm as their time approaches. We are all doing the same, hopefully with similar enjoyment of the task.

Some people find that terrifying. They scramble through life trying to accumulate goods, wealth and properties in their own names as insulation against bad times and unexpected circumstances, only to discover they are no happier in their faux-security than those around them. In the end, they leave this world when their time is up just like you and I will, without a shred more in their grasping claws when they go. The things they have accumulated are not really theirs either, but they just don’t know it. The only difference is that they have usually wasted way more time acquiring them, just to see them go up in smoke.

For the Christian, knowing we are only stewards and servants is certainly a grave responsibility (after all, our Master is looking for a return on his investment), but it’s also unbelievably liberating. Passing on the things that belong to the Lord is a privilege beyond price, whether they are material or spiritual. It’s certainly more dignified than hovering over our shriveling financial statements like Gollum on the edge of the Cracks of Doom. The words “my precious” have more ordinate objects than gold, stocks or bonds, or even the sentimental appeal of the old family homestead.