What Does Stewardship Mean?
Have you ever been somewhere beautiful, and imagined yourself as a visitor from another planet seeing the earth for the first time. Perhaps a sunset that turns the sky layered shades of deep violet, red and orange. Perhaps you’ve seen tropical mountains at dusk as wispy clouds float gently past massive peaks. Or maybe just a simple hike through the beautiful woods of Northern Michigan in fall when leaves, that amazingly have turned every color of the spectrum, drop softly at your feet. At those times, when you take a step back and look at our planet with fresh eyes, it’s hard not to be awestruck.
Contrast that with the feeling you get while driving through an industrial zone, thick smoke billowing into the sky, acrid smog burning your nostrils. Or looking at a polluted stream: plastic shopping bags, cigarette butts, soda cans and candy bar wrappers floating in oil-tinged water. Or even watching TV clips of bulldozers as they plow down some stretch of old-growth rainforest to make room for new farmland.
Perhaps we take the beauty of this planet, and the inevitability that this beauty will always remain, for granted. We have been gifted with this home, we are its stewards, but no one has guaranteed us that there will always be non-littered forests to walk. Nor clean lakes, rivers and oceans to swim. Nor clean water to drink. Nor fresh air to breathe.
Just as clean healthy food, water and air nourish the body; untouched nature nourishes our soul. I don’t want to imagine a world where there is nowhere left in nature that is free of human pollution; a world where a wrapper and a plastic bottle is to be found under every bush, no matter how remote. And yet, how far from this reality are we currently? Is there anywhere on this planet that is untouched?
And maybe that is what stewardship means. Recognizing that if we don’t take care of the things we love, these things may no longer take care of us.
Jeffrey Mindell writes poems, articles, comics, and has even written a few books (unfortunately yet to be published). He can be reached at jmindell@gmail.com