Chapter Nine

Why, The Good Steward

..."Okay" I said, "I buy into what you’ve said and I quite agree. But what you haven’t told us is how one can buy a car in advance and what does that have to do with Biblical stewardship?"

I knew it was a cheap shot as soon as I said it. And to be honest, I expected him to falter but to my and everyone else’s surprise, he just waded on in with an answer that stuns me to this day.

He said, "At some level, as we all work, we trade our lives in, at different rates, for monetary exchange. That is a good thing. Some of us don’t perform the exchange as wisely as others, while others cheat the system and get more in exchange for their labor than they deserve for the labor they’ve actually put in, but in general, the system is balanced. The tragedy is that there is a force out there called consumerism that is driving us all to over reach the boundaries of what our skills and abilities can justifiably produce. Today, we see a thing. Then we want the thing – we want it because it has been cleverly marketed to us in a way that makes us believe that we just ‘have’ to have the ‘it’ or we’ll be incomplete. We see ourselves owning it and we foolishly attach our self esteem to the ownership of it. In fact, once we do this, it, the thing, owns us and we no longer own ourselves. Once you sign on the dotted line for any car here, you no longer have the option of who, where, and even if, you want to work. Let’s say you", he pointed to Gilbert Worthing, a twenty-something salesman who was just a bit dashing, "wanted to buy this Benz – let’s say it made you feel that you were ‘da man’. We can assume that owning it, you would perceive that when you drive it, people would stare at you with admiration and wonder. And let’s say that it cost you nearly all you earn to purchase it on a time payment plan of eight years – would you be happy?

Most likely, you’d say yes but that would be for now. What would you do when you wanted to move away from home because you wanted privacy with your new girlfriend that you believed the new Benz helped you get, but you couldn’t because you couldn’t afford it with your big car note, you’d be miserable. And what if your boss got a promotion and your new boss didn’t care for you and casually decided to make your life difficult? Could you just up and quit without having another job to go to? No! You’d have to suck it up or risk losing your Benz to the repo man. And what would you do when your warranty ran out yet you still have five years more of payments and just when you thought you had it made, the exhaust system needed replacing at the cost of a whopping months worth of your salary? Then you’d have to go out and trade even more of your future by placing the expensive repair on your credit card which by the way, with your lower disposable income, would only allow you to make the minimum payments which means that by the time you pay off the credit card, the actual exhaust system replacement will have cost you almost four times the original cost.

"What I am saying is that your willingness to sacrifice your future to your ego and your ego’s need to see itself driving that car, that your life will have been sacrificed to the car, the bank, the manufacturer, the credit card company. What’s left over for you won’t be worth the price of admission to a movie. Worse, if you drive down to Lehman’s scrap yard, yes today, now in fact, you will see Benz’s that are anywhere from eight-to-twelve years old. Cars that made their owners just as happy as you’d be today. But there they are, scrap. And those owners like you, will have traded away the irreplaceable days of their lives for something that will have no eventual value and will end up as twisted pieces of rusted ego on the scrap heap of your life. Does that sound like good stewardship to anyone here? Hummmm?"

I believe it was Lester Pickering who said it first, "Wow!"

"Wow is right" scowled William Hastings Young. "It seems to me that the only person who is exercising good stewardship is the preacher at the church who takes your tithes and goes to buy the same Benz with cash. Ain’t that an irony that the one who teaches stewardship is the only one who uses it while his members languish in economic stupidity so that he can live well. Can it be that perhaps he is only preaching the giving side of stewardship all the time neglecting to teach the living and receiving side of good stewardship? Ha!" he interjected with a hateful twitch.

"You asked what does this have to do with Biblical stewardship? It has all to do with it. I don’t subscribe to all that religious stuff and you all know it. Your Bible however, is the most powerful manual on how to live a good life. In general, you Christians believe, I should say, are taught, that good stewardship is faithful tithing and generous offerings. You are taught from your childhood about giving back ten percent but have ignored all that the Scriptures say about life, debt, stewardship, and what ultimately, is a way of life.

"Let’s start with stewardship. That’s a big one that no one ever gets. How many of you have ever flown on a commercial airline?"

The showroom was now filled with nearly one-hundred-fifty people. People had seen people coming from the coffee shop, the dress shop and the diner. Main street flowed into the building like ants to a crumb of bread. People came through the doors whispering, "where is he?"

As he asked, then looked around to observe those who answered, he saw that clearly more than half the people standing had raised their hands.

He said, "good! Now when you fly, who is it that you see more of than anyone else on the plane?"

He paused listening to the weak guesses from the growing crowd.

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