The Power and Poetry of a STEWARDSHIP Attitude
By Richard Eyre

Editor's note: Because of the unexpectedly high level of interest in the Alternatives, Richard was able to get a discounted quantity of his book Stewardship of the Heart (pictured in last week's column) for Meridian readers. The book begins with a short novel about a variety of people discovering the need to replace their Ownership attitudes with Stewardship attitudes. If you would be interested in receiving a copy, write to Richard@meridianmagazine.com.

Introduction

In trying to reveal and explain what I think I have learned about the powerful paradigm of Stewardship and the difference it can make in our lives when we live by its precepts rather than with attitudes of Ownership, I find that what I am talking about is feelings, and feelings tend to lend themselves more to poetry than to prose, so forgive me for putting some of today's column into the broken lines of verse.
Let’s begin by reminding ourselves of the truths that spring from the quotes of last week's column — the truths

That go with the concept of
“Stewardship”
In a way, the idea of Stewardship defies description — or is difficult,
because it evolves, expands, elevates.
It begins as an attitude, a mental approach,
An aware assessment of things as they really are here in God's world.
But as it mixes and mingles with the spirit of the Giver,
It becomes a feeling,
Deeper and sweeter than the mind,
Touching us, moving us,
Reaching in to heart, to soul.
It intertwines with guidance, with gratitude,
And creates the peaceful speed of going slow,
Expanding time,
Warming the colors and textures of the every-day,
Revealing unexpected, exquisite joy,
Sifting and softening the strong sunlight of self
So that it absorbs and accepts and assists others
Rather than reflecting off of them.

Stewardship is not so much
A part of life,
But a definition of it and a way of it.
His definition, His way.
This column tries to be a highlighter
And a guide into the process.
The thesis of this column is simple and startling.

It is that in the perspective of eternal reality, human beings own nothing except the agency God has given them.

Furthermore, the illusion of ownership, and particularly the pre-occupation with it, causes:

• Pride
• Envy
• Greed
• Frustration
• Win-lose competition
• Selfishness
• Stress
• Hoarding
• Vanity
• Manipulation
• Squandering
• Covetousness
• Conceit
• Over-confidence
• Condescension
• Fear
• Bitterness in tragedy
• A judgmental nature

Think about the cause and effect. Remove the notion of owning, and each of these traits loses its very foundation. Or think of each of these negative and unhappy characteristics as branches and realize that the illusion of ownership is their root.

The simple and powerful truth is that God owns all. But to us, His children, He has given the use of, the responsibility for, the stewardship over things, talents, time, callings, physical bodies, and even over others of His children.

We need to understand stewardship, first, because it is reality, and any other paradigm or world-view is a deception; and, second, because thinking and living like stewards can rid us of the damning characteristics above and replace them with their opposites:

• Humility
• Empathy
• Generosity
• Fulfillment
• Win-win cooperation
• Selflessness
• Peace
• Sharing
• Modesty
• Respect
• Frugality
• Satisfaction
• Meekness
• Worshipful faith and awe
• Equality
• Courage
• Sweet acceptance of sorrow
• Tolerance

Each of these qualities are effects that can stem from the cause of an attitude of the heart called stewardship.

This is not merely
A column on anti-materialism
(although it includes that)
material things (mis-named possessions) are just one category
of what we don’t own,
but do have stewardship over.
There are many other categories:
(and their “ownership” is often harder to give up than possessions)
abilities
friends
callings
earth’s beauty
opportunities
talents
“our” children
time
spouse
physical bodies
trials
tests
loves.
If we think we own
Any of these
Or have earned them or deserve them
We’re wrong,
And we’re harmed by the error.
But
He has given them to us!
Yes,
But they are gifts of
Stewardship
Which can produce the opposite effects
Of wrong, prideful ownership
And
Which is a step toward
The right kind of ultimate eternal ownership.
God
Wants us to have all that He has
And be
All that He is
Thus He gives all –
But wisely, gradually,
Through a sequence involving stewardship.
Ownership
(in its right and righteous form)
follows
sometimes here,
usually hereafter.
If,
For now
As stewards,
We learn to love them, build them,
Guide them, build them,
We will come to know their joy
And the joy of their Giver.

The Paradigm Perception

A paradigm is a world-view, a perspective or a framework within or through which we view our world. One’s paradigm is his reality – the way he thinks things are. Every once in a while we gain a new insight or discover a new reality that changes or shifts our paradigm, and suddenly everything looks different to us.

Consider the captain of a ship who sees on his radar another vessel that is directly in his path. He gets on his radio and requests that it change course. It answers back, “You change course.” Angered, the captain sends a more authoritative message, demanding that the other vessel move. “You move,” comes back the answer. Enraged, the captain asks for the identity of the insolent answerer. The reply totally changes the captain’s paradigm.

“I am the lighthouse!”

Paradigm shifts of an even more serious nature happen when people hear and accept the Gospel. Eternal truths about who we are and where we came form change how we see ourselves and how we view our lives. In turn, the way we view life changes how we live life — alters what we think is important, and motives us to reach higher and strive to be better.

Change a person’s glasses and you may change his sight, thus improving the clarity with which he sees his surroundings. But add to a person’s knowledge and you may change his insight, thus improving his clarity and understanding of himself and of his life.

Insight is a fascinating word because it implies an inner sight — our “real eyes” — something we view with our spiritual eyes — something deeper and more permanent than the surface — something that may change how we live as well as how we see.

There are some particular insights, all of them gifts of the restoration, which can assist in shifting our prevailing paradigm from one of ownership to one of stewardship. Think through a few of them with me.

**

The Plan of Our Father and Our Elder Brother

I had just knelt with my precocious two-and-a-half-year-old daughter at her bedside for her evening prayer, trying to help her talk candidly and personally to God. As we finished, she looked up full into my face and, with a sparkle in her round, blue eyes, made a proud (and profound) declaration:

“I have two daddies!”

“Who?” I asked.

She answered without words but with a beaming smile and pointing finger which pointed first at me and then straight up in the air.

Then she went on, “And, I have another brother. A big, big, big, big brother named Jesus!”

I patted her on the head, told her that she was exactly right, and tucked her into bed.

It wasn’t until later, lying in the silence of my own bed, that I thought about the fact that there was no deeper insight in the world, no more profound or important statement of truth, nor fact that could affect more on how we see or how we live.

**

The literal reality of God as our father and Christ as our eldest brother (and also as a father through the birth of our baptism) is the root of all that we understand about the purpose of this earth and of this life. Without this insight, religion itself is vague, symbolic, and even impersonal.

If you want to start an interesting discussion with a non-LDS Christian, ask him why he refers to God as Heavenly Father. The answer may be, “He created us, and thus is like our father,” or, “It is a title of ultimate respect,” or, “His love is like that of a great father.” Without a belief in a pre-existence (which no other Christian church holds) where we were born as spiritual offspring of God, calling Him Father is merely a metaphor.

What a wondrous insight to know that “Heavenly Father” is not merely a title, or a symbol of respect, but a simple, literal reality; and to know that Jesus, as the first born spirit, I our eldest brother as well as our Savior.

Primary children sing “I am a Child of God,” unaware that their words form the most profound truth of all. Knowing these relationships changes everything. Our respect for all men, all women, and all children (including our own) is enhanced because we see them as all brothers and sisters. Our tolerance expands, because we are aware that no matter how big our differences may be with others, they can never match our similarities. Our confidence expands as we accept our Godlike heredity, even as our humility deepens in acknowledgement of His perfection and our imperfection. We begin to see the earth and all of mortality not only as a gift, but as an inheritance.

And as if the relationship was not enough, we also are privileged to know the plan. How natural that a father would plan for his children, that a father, to the best of his ability, would provide a way, a means, a path for the happiness and well-being of his children.

A father of perfect abilities would provide a perfect plan — as our Father has done — containing agency by which we can test ourselves, atonement by which we can overcome the sin and death that must be part of our test, families through which we can assume the role of parents (previously a role and title only to God) physical bodies to experience physical beauty and develop discipline, and a world full of challenges, opportunities, surprises, gifts, and joys.

The best one-word title or description of this plan — in which a wise father entrusts his finest things to his children, allowing them to develop and prove themselves — is stewardship.

The Adversary’s Alternative (Plan B)

We know the story, or part of it, through restored scripture. It is the story of ourselves, in our first estate, and the story of the great conflict where agency, atonement, and the glory of God was pitted against coercion, manipulation, and Lucifer’s glory.

Lucifer, as we know, lost the battle but won the mis-guided allegiance of one-third of our spirit brothers and sisters. He did not lose gracefully or with any attempt at reconciliation, but with vows of eternal opposition, thus becoming the adversary that the Father’s plan required.

With his departure, the scriptural story ends, but the story only begins of his demonic and unceasing struggle to win us to him and take us from God.

How does Satan go about his sworn objective to take us form God and to control the world God has made? Yes, he tempts us and tries to run us from the light and cause us to break the Lord’s commandments. But how does he go about his? What is his strategy or game plan?

We know something of Satan’s nature. It is unwise to dwell on him or become too aware of him (C.S. Lewis said, “There are two grace mistakes we can make with regard to the devil — one is to think too much about him, the other is not to think enough about him”), but it is always helpful (and healthy) to know an opponent’s strategy well enough to fight or avoid it effectively.

When Satan’s “plan A” (coercion and force) failed, he adopted “plan B.” Here are hints of plan B in scripture. “I will buy them up,” he says, “with gold and silver.” He says that if we do not care for what we have been given he will take it away.

Plan A was to keep us from having agency. Plan B is to use our agency against us. In a way, the plans are not too different. Satan’s goal has always been to enslave us. First he tried to do so by taking our agency. Now he tries to do so by using our agency, in its most selfish forms, to orient us to getting and keeping and hoarding and having — all of which enslave us.

Satan’s plans are always counter to God’s. He tried to counter God’s plan of agency with force. Now he tries to counter God’s plan of selfless stewardship with selfish ownership. Where a stewardship mentality can build pride and enslave.

How well is Satan’s plan B working? Look around! People spending more than they earn — and spending it before they earn it; judging themselves and others on how much they have; becoming jealous and envious of each other based on relative possessions. Bumper stickers say, “He who dies with the most toys wins” or “I owe, I own, so off to work I go.” A pretentiousness reigns in which we spend more than we can afford for houses bigger than we need, or for cars and clothes designed to impress.

Satan’s plan B of ownership involves counterfeit connections between things and joy. The connections don’t work. All that ownership provides is pride, worry and selfish “protectiveness,” and dangerous feelings of independence from God.

Case studies of the effects of plan B abound in The Book of Mormon. Riches and perceived ownership repeatedly led to pride, which led to apostasy and wickedness. Only a couple of times was the cycle broken — and then only by unselfishness and attitudes of stewardship.

Now, as then, the defense against plan B and the antidote to Satan’s poison of pride is the acknowledgment of God’s ownership of all, and the joyful acceptance of our favored role as children, stewards, and heirs!

All Things are Mine, Saith the Lord

Think through this little list of facts:

1. In one way, God owns us as well as all things. In fact, His ownership is doubled where we are concerned. We are the Father’s because we are His children. We are Christ’s because He purchased us with His blood.
2. One way of realizing that we own nothing is to acknowledge that there is nothing over which we have ultimate control or which we can never lose or have taken from us. Talents and gifts, like callings or Priesthood, like possessions and like children, are given to us to use and develop, but can be forfeited (and perhaps, in God’s perfect economy, given to others) through ill use. Satan, for example, no longer has some gifts and talents that once were his stewardship.
3. It could be well argued that we own our bodies. We will lose them at death, but we will all reclaim them in the resurrection. Christ’s atonement assures that. Still, since we will lose our bodies for a time, and since their nature and glory when we take them again depends on our righteousness, it behooves us to think of them in their present from as a stewardship
4. The more complete exception is our agency. This we own. This we can never lose or have taken from us. This one thing is given not as a stewardship but as an outright, absolute gift. Since it is the one thing we own, it is the one thing we can give God.
5. Religion, without his sense or insight of stewardship, may not work in the lives of men. This is why, in many “religious” people through the ages and in many “active and faithful” Church members today, there is greed, selfishness, and materialism.
6. There are four levels on which people can live, depending on their paradigms. The highest level, level 4, is stewardship:
   
   

   • Level 1. “The world owes me a living.” • Level 2. “I own, you own. I deserve what I’ve got,   and you deserve what you’ve got.” • Level 3. “Where much is given, much is   required. I’ve been given much, so I must give.” • Level 4. All is God’s. Through my stewardships I   can assist Him in His purposes.

Noble and high as the third level is, it does not “plug in” to God’s power as level 4 does. On level 3 we might seek guidance by asking “What would Jesus do if this were His?” On level 4 we would ask, “What would Jesus have me do with this since it is His?”

Once again the bottom line of the insight is stewardship. All are His and we are His. “All things are mine, saith the Lord.”

An Antidote for Pride

Many Church members who heard it can still remember President Benson's classic conference talk on pride.

“Pride,” said President Benson, “is the great stumbling block to Zion, and we are warned that the proud shall burn as stubble.” Then with a wonderful directness and economy of words, he said that pride:

• Is ugly, saying, “If you succeed, I am a failure.”
• Keeps us from learning new things, since doing so sometimes requires us to admit that we were wrong.
• Prevents unity and thus keeps us from God who says, “If ye are not the one ye are not mine.”
• Is the seed that brings the fruit of secret combinations.
• Is sometimes the rich and successful looking down on those with less.
• But is more often those who have done less, resenting and criticizing and being jealous of those who have more.
• Centers in competitiveness and enmity which pulls us apart and divides us from others.
• Kept the church from establishing Zion in the day of Joseph Smith.

President Benson then warned that “God will have a bumble people; we can choose to be humble or we can be compelled to be humble.” He suggested ways that we could move away from enmity and pride and toward humility: give selfless service, forgive others, serve missions, attend the temple, confess and forsake sins, become as a child, love God, and submit our wills to Him.

Pride, in all the forms that President Benson mentioned, stems from the false concept of ownership. Thinking we own things breeds enmity because if someone else owns it, we can’t; and if we win, someone else loses. With stewardship, we appreciate others’ gifts as much as our own; we are increasingly humble as more is entrusted to us, more inclined to use what we have in His service; and the only pride we feel is pride in our Lord, which manifests itself in the form of praise and worship.

If the “what” is to eliminate pride and to develop humility, then the “how” is an attitude of stewardship.

**

Definitions and Roots

I sat at dinner with a friend, talking about stewardship and about an early draft of this book, which he had read.

“We have a lot of wrong ideas about stewardship,” he said. “Even in its economic sense, in the early days of the Church and in the United Order experiments, the idea was not to have all things in common or to have exactly equal or similar stewardships. People were given what they could handle, and the goal was the common good.”

My friend had some expertise in semantics and etymology. We talked about how words sometimes evolve outside their original meaning. The English “Commonwealth,” for example, is often taken to mean the common wealth — or things owned in common. The original word, however, was “common weal” which meant for the common good — things that could be used by all and not be diminished.

Stewardship is not intended by God to make everyone poorer, but to make everyone richer, to wisely transfer all that He has to His children, His heirs.

The root stig, which means “upward reaching,” to strive, to try, evolved into stew.

The root ware means to watch out for, as in “beware.” This evolved into the root ward. A ward of the court in England is an heir who is watched over until he is old enough to take over on his own.

Steward: One who watches over that to which he is heir, while reaching upward, acknowledging its source, remembering its Giver, striving to handle it as He would, use it as He would, give it as He would.

An accepter of true stewardship tries to build, to strengthen, to multiply. He does not take pride or abdicate or give up, but neither does he wish for less. A steward over property does not count it as power or superiority, but neither does he give it up by a vow of poverty. A steward over sexual desire and powers of procreation does not squander or use them lightly, but neither does he try to ride himself of them by a vow of celibacy.

Next Week

Thanks for your interest in Stewardship — and in all of the three Alternatives as the gospel-oriented replacements for the Three Deceivers. Join me here next week when we will be talking about how a Stewardship attitude leads to JOY, and how it connects to leadership, to balance, and to the first alternative of Serendipity.

Again, if you would like a signed copy of Richard's book Stewardship of the Heart, write to Richard@meridianmagazine.com.

Click here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.