Nothing You Manage Belongs to You

When I was in seminary I worked as the head of security for a very wealthy man.

I had keys to a house that wasn’t mine. I knew the alarm codes. I knew the schedule, which meant I knew when the house was empty. I knew how everything in it worked. There was expensive artwork on the walls, which is why my patron needed security around the clock in the first place: he could not get the place insured without it. Everything in that house was worth more than my entire net worth, and more than it was ever likely to become.

Nobody watched me do that job.

It was a good job and he was a generous man, and what I learned there has stayed with me. I learned what it means to care for somebody else’s property, and to put it to the use the master intends.

Not everyone who had the job understood that. Two men before me, someone else had held the same keys. Part of that house was given over to Americana, and the dining room table had belonged to George Washington. It still got used as a dining room table, but carefully, because you do not do anything that might compromise it. While the family was away, that man decided the house would be a fine place to have some people over. When the family came home they found a mess, and on Washington’s table, empty pizza boxes.

Is that how the head of the house expected his things to be cared for while he was away?

The whole job I inherited came down to one question, and it is not a question about houses or antiques: what do you do with something that belongs to someone else when the owner isn’t there to see it?

That question sits underneath everything else in your life. Underneath your calendar. Underneath your bank account. Underneath your body and your work. Nothing you manage ultimately belongs to you.

Everything at Squared Away Life rests on that one idea, and I had never given it a whole episode. This is the written version of the one I finally made: what I mean by stewardship, what changes when you take it seriously, and what to do about it this week.

A steward runs a household that isn’t his

That is a very basic definition, and it is the entire definition.

The New Testament word for a steward is the root of our word economy, which comes from two Greek words: oikos and nomos, house and law. An economy is the law of a house, and a steward is the man who manages that law and keeps the house running. He buys the food. He pays the staff. He keeps the books. He makes the decisions, all of it inside a house he will never own.

So notice what a steward is not.

He is not a guest. He is not a renter counting down his lease. He is not a babysitter, told exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. A steward has real authority. He spends money that isn’t his. He makes judgment calls nobody will review one by one. He is trusted, which is a different thing from being supervised or managed.

The one thing he does not have is ownership.

The master goes away

Jesus told this kind of story over and over. A master goes away. A manager is left in charge. The manager has freedom, resources, time, and nobody standing over his shoulder. Every one of those parables turns on the same hinge: the owner comes back, and there is a conversation about what happened while he was gone.

Scripture presents this as the arrangement rather than as a figure of speech. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Not most of it. Not the religious dimension of it. The fullness of it, which means your Tuesday is in there, your ordinary every day is in there, and so is your checking account.

Ownership leaves you one question

Here is why that matters practically, and not only theologically.

Almost every piece of advice you will ever hear about your time, your money or your health assumes that you are the owner. People like to think that way. It’s my life. It’s my time. It’s my money. And once you assume ownership in an ultimate sense, there is really only one question available to you: what do you want, and how do you get more of it?

Once you start thinking that way, you start working along the lines of optimization. Optimization is fine as far as it goes. It just runs out. It never reaches the deeper matter, or the more transcendent one.

Stewardship is a different model, and it does not take your authority away. You still have agency. You still decide how the things entrusted to your care get employed. What changes is the question. It is no longer what you can get out of this. With everything entrusted to you, the question becomes: what return does the owner get?

Same calendar. Same bank account. Same flesh and bones. Different question, and a different question starts producing different answers almost immediately.

Take your time. If the hours are yours, the question is how to squeeze more out of them. If the hours were given to you, the question is what they were given to do. Those two questions do not lead to the same day.

Three things change

These are the same three the foundation of this site sets out.

Everything entrusted to you has an owner, which means it has a purpose that isn’t yours to assign. You did not decide the purpose of your money, or your body, or your work. You can find it out. It is told to you; it is revealed to you. Honestly, that is a relief. Receiving a purpose is a much smaller job than making one up.

It makes you honest about your limits. A steward operates on a budget, and a budget is not insulting. It is not a hindrance; it is a help. You have a finite number of hours, a finite amount of money, and a body that will eventually wear out. If you are the owner, those limits look like failures. If you are a steward, they are simply the terms. You do not need to apologize for being a creature with limitations. You can carry out the task with joy. This is also why heroic effort doesn’t scale. There is an upper limit to what you can possibly do, and you cannot simply work harder indefinitely.

It changes what counts as success. Owners measure what they have accumulated. Stewards are measured on what they have returned, and those two scoreboards can point in opposite directions. A man can accumulate for forty years and return almost nothing. He might even lose. Another can be given very little, be faithful, and return much in proportion to what he was handed. Success gets categorized by faithfulness rather than by mass.

Is this an audit, then?

I know where some of you are, because it is where I would be. Everyone will be called to account on the last day, and if none of this is mine, that sounds like a life lived under audit.

The picture that forms is God as a sort of cosmic, transcendent IRS. He is coming, he will demand an account, he will want to see all the receipts, and your job is to keep up with the paperwork well enough to stay out of eternal jail for tax evasion or embezzlement. That is a servile way to live, and plenty of people have heard stewardship taught and landed exactly there.

As plainly as I can say it: that is not the picture.

Go back to Matthew 25. A master leaves money with three servants and goes away. Two of them put it to work. When he comes back he does not say received, properly filed. He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master.” The parable does not end with a receipt. It ends with an invitation inside.

Then look at the one who got it wrong. He buried his master’s money in the ground so he could hand it back untouched. He did not steal anything. He did not lose anything. He just made sure he could not be blamed. And when he explains himself, he gives his reason: I was afraid.

Fear buries. Joy invests.

See how badly fear reasons. The master points out that he could at least have put the money in the bank and collected the interest, which was effectively a no-risk investment. Fear talked him out of a free return and into a hole in the ground, and there is probably some laziness in there as well.

That is the difference between the two pictures, and it decides what kind of steward you become. If you think the owner is looking for a reason to be disappointed, you will play defense with your life. You will keep your head down and try to hand it back untouched. If you know he is glad to multiply what he has put in your hands, you will take risks with it — wise risks — and you will want to bring back more than you were given, and deliver your master a return.

So I am not telling you to be more responsible. I am telling you there is joy at the end of this. Joy. That is what should drive us.

The six domains or trusts

What has been entrusted to you? This is not a tidy inventory of a life. It is six standing kinds of trust: six dimensions, six perspectives on the whole of it, and most of what you are responsible for falls into more than one at once.

• Your mind. You were given the ability to take in what is true and hold on to it. Your mind is formed by whatever you let into it, and you will be transformed for good or for ill whether you chose it or not.
• Your time. You have been given a finite number of days, and you do not know the number.
• Your work. Your abilities and your position, and with them, by the fifth commandment, your superiors, your inferiors and your equals.
• Your means. The money and other assets entrusted to you, which pass through your hands. They are yours for a time, to employ for the master’s benefit.
• Your body. Which scripture says very flatly is not your own, because you were bought with a price, and because those who make up the body of Christ are a temple of the Holy Spirit. By the sixth commandment we employ our bodies to promote life.
• Your people and relationships. Your marriage, your children, your parents as they get older, the people in your congregation, and the neighbors and friends who rely on you, maybe more than they have said.

Caring for an aging parent falls into several of these at once: your people, your means and your time, all of it together. I do not mean that these are separate silos or isolated containers, hermetically sealed from one another. They overlap, and most of what comes up in life touches more than one. They are six angles or perspectives on a single question: what will you do with what has been entrusted to you?

Square it away

Pick one thing that has been entrusted to you. Your calendar this week, one account, one relationship you have been handling with whatever the day has left.

Then put the owner’s question to it instead of your own. Don’t think what you can get out of it, but ask what return you can provide the master from it. Name the one thing that answer changes, and change it before the next decision you make about it.

If you want the daily practice underneath all of this, the one that keeps me reflective and proactive about the things entrusted to me, you can get a free pre-publication copy of my book The Compounding Mind by subscribing to the newsletter.

If you are not sure there is an owner

Everything above depends on there being an owner, and that owner is the Lord. If you are not sure what you believe about that, I would rather say so plainly than talk around it.

Start with this short talk on what makes the gospel good news: God’s Gift of Himself. I wrote a booklet under the same title, published by Reformed Forum, and I will email you a copy at no cost. Just write to me and ask. And if you would rather talk with somebody about these things, I am glad to hear from you.

Next time we go somewhere this gets more uncomfortable and more specific: the stewardship of your money.

Nothing you manage ultimately belongs to you. Not your hours. Not even your health. Not the work that carries your name. And the owner is not waiting to audit you. He is waiting to say well done, and to bring you into his joy.

Until then, let’s go get squared away.