It's Not Yours

In my first year at the school I am teaching at now, my lights worked through a sensor that detected movement and stayed on as long as there was something there. It made it easy to turn on, because all you had to do was walk into the classroom and they would flash on. When I was leaving, it was easy to forget because you had to actually turn off the button near the door, which I often passed by and came in the next morning with the lights all on. The sensor would occasionally not work and make the lights stay on if I didn’t hit the button.

One day, as I was leaving, I remember thinking something along the lines of, “why does it matter that I turn these lights off? I mean, it’s not my electricity bill.” If we’re honest, it is what a lot of us wonder. If it’s a hotel, an Airbnb, or a public bathroom, it doesn’t matter how we leave it – it’s not ours. This thought process completely ignores the idea of stewardship, or the responsibility to oversee something that is not yours. If you realize everything is not yours – but God’s – you treat it better. Though it might be instinctual to forget the lights in a hotel, I also think there is another desire to nurture the world around us. It’s why some people, including Christians, care so much about preserving the environment. The physical world around us needs to be treated well, or else it withers away. Everything from our money to our bathrooms and trees needs to be taken care of, because we’re all in this together.

But even if you don’t understand the concept of stewardship, or you don’t believe in God, there’s still another case for this application. Take a piece of trash you see walking down the street. If you’re in a busy city, you probably see a lot of it. But let’s consider something really obvious, like one huge bag that you would have to actively ignore not to pick up. By picking it up, you are helping the culture and mindset of those around you. You are showing yourself and other people that you care about more than yourself, and that you are willing to do for other people what you would do in your own house.

If that piece of trash were right inside your front door, it probably wouldn’t stay there long. You would pick it up and put it in your kitchen trash can. In the same way, the more you think of the collective well-being, the more you strengthen the culture of everyone.

Steward the environment around you. Consider the idea that it is more than just a collection of physical things around you, but people and possessions in God’s care. A quick mindset shift might change everything, because at the end of the day, none of it is yours.