Stewardship describes the doing part of the faith journey. Practicing good stewardship means using faithfully what God has entrusted to our care: time, talents, and treasure. Stewardship is two things. First, it's discovering who we are -- what we have the potential to do with our lives and the dreams that give our lives direction. Second, it's living our lives: being our true selves and using our potential to fulfill our dreams (our sense of calling).

The first "T" of stewardship is time.  Each of us gets the same amount of time: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Of course, we don't know how many days and weeks of life we will eventually have, but time appears to be a gift that is equally distributed in terms of our daily lives. Time can vary greatly, however, depending on your attitude. The seconds seem to creep by when we're doing a tedious task and they fly past when we're having fun. To the extent we can stay in the present moment, we have all the time in the world - an eternal now! When we are preoccupied with worry (living in the future) or regret/guilt (living in the past), there never seems to be enough time just to be ourselves. The stewardship of our time is, in large measure, a matter of letting our minds stay with our bodies -- in the present moment. This makes it easier for us to be free and generous in sharing our time with others. We have all the time in the world!   

The second "T" of stewardship is talents. The distribution of talents and energy is not equal. Some people just seem to have a boatload of ability and others never seem to get tired. Sometimes this abundance of talent and energy belongs to the same person!

Do you ever feel that you don't have quite as much talent as the next person? Does your own energy seem to dissipate too quickly?  C. S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, wrote something that applies this perception that our own talents and energy don't quite measure up. On several occasions, Lewis had the great lion Aslan remind one of the characters, "This is your story." When we compare our talents with someone else's, we can come up lacking. But this is our story.  Our talents and energy are ours and they are completely appropriate for us. The more we embrace what we have to offer the more we can share it freely, and the more we can make a difference to those whose lives ours touch.

The third "T" of stewardship is treasure. It is abundantly clear that we don't all have the same amount of money! And since money is pretty basic to the ability of people to survive - food, clothing, shelter - how money is distributed is pretty important. Yet it is our attitude toward money -- just like our attitude toward time, talents, and energy -- that matters most in terms of the quality of our lives. The fear that we don't have enough money is much like the fear that we don't have enough time or that our talents and energies aren't valuable. The more simply we live, the more money we'll have to share and to invest in changing the world.

Abundance of time, talents, and treasure is, for most of us, a matter of attitude. In all three aspects of stewardship, freedom is key. There is no greater experience of abundance than sharing the time, talent, energy, and money we have freely to realize our dreams and to help those we love to grow.

Thanks for continuing to bless me as we journey together.
  
Jack Price

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