Gratefulness, the Heart of Stewardship

by Katherine Harms
(Baltimore, MD)

Do you ask yourself how much money a good steward would give to your church? Do you want to please God by giving the right amount? How do you define good stewardship?

All tithes from the land, whether the seed from the ground or the fruit from the tree, are the Lord’s; they are holy to the Lord. Leviticus 27:30

You tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. Matthew 23:23

When I was a small child, I believed that stewardship was about money. Long sermons called congregants to responsible stewardship. Stewardship seemed to equal tithing. I struggled with calculation of my tithe like a Pharisee counting out garden herbs. Then some familiar words touched me with an unfamiliar emphasis.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. Psalm 24:1

I had become pleased with myself for tithing “my” money, but this verse shouted that it wasn’t mine at all. In fact, it appeared that there was no such thing as “mine.” The words were familiar, but the lesson jolted me. I owned nothing; God owned everything.

This was scary. And daunting. I had spent years learning the discipline of tithing. However, if God owned everything, then how could I give him anything? I was transported back to my childhood when my mother gave me money to buy her a birthday present. I felt impoverished and helpless.

You prepare a table before me. Psalm 23:5

Give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6:11

One day these familiar verses spoke to me as if for the first time. God was providing my food! I thought I was taking my money to the store and choosing and buying food, which I took home and prepared as I wished. I thought wrong. God was preparing the table. It was God’s provision that filled my pantry. God was giving me what he owned. When a person gives me the gift of a meal, I feel obligated to reciprocate, but God does not need to eat. I felt accountable for the meal, but I did not know what to do about it. God was not finished with me yet.

On my next trip to the grocery store I started, as usual, with produce. I selected a rich red, fully ripe tomato with a bit of green stem still attached. The flesh was firm but yielding to the touch. It even smelled like a tomato. The aroma carried me into a reverie wherein I savored the simple tomato-ness of that delightful fruit.

When I resumed reality, I was humming some nameless tune. I had fallen through a hole in time and space into something eternal and ineffable. I became profoundly aware that this tomato, precisely this tomato, was God’s creation and a gift to me. Enveloped by this revelation, I continued shopping. Everything I picked up seemed extraordinary. My shopping trip felt like a succession of lovely surprises as I moved among God’s gifts to me.

The surprise led directly to thanksgiving. When somebody gives me a special gift, I always feel thankful. Some people have a talent for choosing gifts that fulfill a yearning the recipient has not even verbalized. God’s tomato was that kind of gift to me. I felt deep gratitude for the tomato and for all the other foods I purchased that day. My thanksgiving extended beyond thankfulness for the foods themselves. I thought about all the people who participated in bringing the food from field to shelf. I meditated on the miracle that God created a world where, instead of some chow called “peoplefood,” we are blessed with tomatoes. I did not own “my” food at all. God had lovingly created this rich gift for me. I was profoundly grateful to God and to all those people.

Overflowing with gratefulness, I prepared meals with this food. I felt about this food the way I felt as a child when my grandmother gave me Easter candy. I always feared losing some of the connection with my grandmother if I failed to taste and enjoy every bite of the Easter candy. Likewise, I felt that it would be an ungrateful to God’s generosity if I wasted one bite of that food by failing to enjoy it. I took time to taste and appreciate each bite,treasuring and appreciating this wonderful gift of food, I lived out my gratitude for something that had never been mine.

This experience opened my eyes. . If God created everything and owned everything, then everything I “possessed” was His. . Nothing was mine to waste. Nothing was mine to hoard. It belonged to God. It was a heavy responsibility.

You might say that in consequence I learned how to use my money and my purchases in a cost-effective way, but my change of attitude and behavior had nothing to do with money. It was entirely about gratefulness. I was so grateful for what God had provided that I couldn’t bear to waste any of it. I wanted each gift to last as long as possible. I wanted to enjoy each gift to the fullest. It almost sounds as if I became frugal.

We associate the term frugality with responsible use of resources. It sounds better than miserliness. We admire people who can do a lot with a little. We think those people exercise self-discipline. They rigidly distinguish between “want” and “need.” Frugality is associated with what my mother called “a made-up mind.” Frugal people decide to live with what they have, and they succeed. I admire frugality, but I did not become frugal.

I became a steward. The difference is huge. A steward uses what belongs to someone else. The steward is not concerned about much or little of someone else’s possessions. Rather, the steward accounts to the owner for the way the possessions are used.

After I was surprised by God’s beautiful gifts and overwhelmed with gratefulness for those gifts, I gave thanks for the blessing and committed myself to use God’s gifts in ways that pleased God. I did not need to measure how much to give Him. Rather, I needed to demonstrate my gratitude by the way I used all his gifts.

I discovered that stewardship is much bigger than what goes in the offering plate. I still consider tithing to be an element of my accountability to God, but that calculation is not the primary focus of my stewardship. Instead, I focus on my growing sense that I must use all of God’s gifts in ways that serve God’s purposes. God wants my family to be fed, clothed and sheltered, so I use the means he has provided to assure those needs are met.

However, I find that my definition of “need” is refined by my obligation to account to God for what I do with all his gifts. The gift of time. The gift of words. The gift of eyes to see what someone else needs. The gift of love that shares and serves. My gratefulness for the opportunity to be generous to God’s purposes protects me from both the grim discipline of calculating what I owe God and the smug self-satisfaction of feeling that I have paid God what I owe him.

Surprise, gratefulness, thanksgiving, stewardship. That is the road I have traveled. God has given me more than everything I need. He has given me plenty and to spare.

When I was growing up, I heard preachers and teachers on the subject of stewardship say, “You can’t outgive God.” They told stories of people who decided to tithe and were subsequently blessed with riches. I can’t address the truth or falsehood of such stories, but I think that whole idea is backwards. I don’t give to God out of a desire for him to give me more. I am motivated by the realization that I have already received “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.” Luke 6:38 God does not need to repay me, because I can never repay Him.