Friends,
Recently I’ve thought a lot about stewardship. Maybe it was all the study about Solomon’s great influence and opportunity two weeks ago for the message. (Or maybe it was the next week thinking about Esther and her faithfulness in a tight spot.)
Stewardship can mean faithfulness with your physical and monetary possessions. But this is not all. As I heard recently, it can mean, Learning to live on less so that others can have more. This is not all, either.
I remember a story I heard told by Frederick Buechner several years ago about an incident in his ministry. He reflected on leading a retreat at Laity Lodge and what he shared as he was asked to tell part of his story. Here’s what he said:
It took place in the 1930's during the Depression when there wasn't much money; an awful lot of drinking was going on in the world and in my family; an unsettled and unsettling time even for a child of ten, which I was.
The episode I described concerned a time when my father had come back from somewhere. He had obviously had too much to drink. My mother did not want him to take the car. She got the keys from him somehow and gave them to me and said, "Don't let you father have these." I had already gone to bed. I took the car keys and I had them in my fist under the pillow. My father came and somehow knew I had the keys and said, "Give them to me. I have got to have them. I have got to go some place."
I didn't know what to say, what to be or how to react. I was frightened, sad and all the rest of it. I lay there and listened to him, pleading really, "Give me the keys."
I pulled the covers over my head to escape the situation and then finally, went to sleep with his voice in my ears. A sad story which stood for a lot of other sadness of those early years.
When I finished reading it, Howard Butt, who is head of the Butt Foundation which finances Laity Lodge, came up to me and said something for which I was utterly unprepared. He said, "You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it." (‘The Stewardship of Pain’, a sermon preached in 1990)
Today will you be a good steward of all you’ve been given (and of all the Lord has brought you through?) Someone dear to you may desperately need it.
Blessings,
Ande Myers
