Skip to main content

Being a good steward

After my parents moved to Korea, my taste for flying diminished greatly. Something about being stuck in a confined space and sitting on your butt for 14+ hours does NOT appeal to me. Although I hate flying, one thing that makes the experience a little better is the airline carrier. Asian airlines just have a different expectation of customer service, and the World Airline Awards say it all.

Today's Bible reading was from Malachi 3, the well-known passage about tithing. Given my very cautious money saving tendencies, the concept of budgeting never really crossed my mind until a few months ago when I started my first full-time job and became financially independent. I remember talking with Moses once and one website he shared with me about money management while giving to God's Kingdom really left an impression.

When I think about good stewardesses on my favorite airline, a couple things stand out: They don't just do the bare minimum--the bare minimum that i expect when flying is that i get from point A to point B safely, and on-time. But good stewardesses are always looking for ways to serve me, and to maximize my happiness (asking if my coat should be hung, offering an extra pillow, even providing seat stickers to indicate if i'd like to be woken up for a meal).

When I think about being a good steward for God, I wonder if I'm really going that second mile.. Am I really willing to do anything and everything to give him pleasure, or am I just doing the minimum to meet the federal regulations? God promises in v10 that if I bring to him what I have, he will "throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that (i) will not have enough room for it."

Being able to give this year (aka actually having the income to give) has been SUCH a tremendous JOY and hands-down my favorite aspect about working life. Even though it wasn't much, if God hadn't given me the opportunity to support a sister to go to Chile for short-term missions or a pastor's family in their first year as missionaries, I would have missed out BIG time--missed out on knowing my small investment was a part of the healing, freedom, and miracles that God performed. God didn't need me but man what a privilege it was to be able to give and to be used. LORD help me to be a good steward of the gifts you have given me, and continue to show me that it is forsURE a bigger blessing to give than to receive.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Delirious

delirious (adj): marked by uncontrollable excitement or emotion; ecstatic; filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy (1 peter 1:8); me I don't think I had a personal relationship with God until 2 weeks ago. There have been a lot of formative moments and experiences in the past 6 years of me considering the existence of a higher-being, 3 yrs of being a Christian, 1 year of living by faith, 6 months of serving on church leadership, 1 month of dire circumstances, each of which have been challenged and supported by specific instances in my life.* But it's only been 2 weeks of finding pure joy, satisfaction, and freedom in Christ (alone). Though it's been 6 years since I first stepped into a church building and 3 years since I accepted Christ, I was always afraid to admit that I didn't know what grace, freedom, repentance, or Jesus meant--in terms other than the ones I had heard or read--it was always a theory and never a reality in my own life. After years of doing chur

And just when you least expect it..

Today I went down to the food court with another intern and as I opened my box of sushi, I hesitated. Feeling as if there were too many eyes on me (I only ate with one other person -_-), I questioned whether I should pray before my meal, in fear of social rejection. After I prayed, she asked me if I was a Christian, and I awkwardly responded that I was. Then she said, "Finally! What a relief to know that there are other Christians!" WHAT THE.. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, sitting with a co-worker that I had simply exchanged cordial greetings with, now talking about God haha. Even though I was scared and honestly did NOT want to pray, God used a habitual thing like that to open up opportunities for me to invite her to small group and share my faith. Crazy how He works when you least expect it.

Honesty

If you're my friend, teammate, lifegroup member (or you have any context with me at all), I've probably hurt you. I've probably hurt you in the way I approached you, made you into an agenda, or seemed disinterested in our friendship at times when we weren't being "purposeful". I probably gave you the idea that I didn't value our time together unless we were doing something "productive"--and in all honesty, you were right--you read right through me, and knew exactly what I was thinking. Ever since experiencing God (personally) for the first time three weeks ago, I've seen how my skewed relationship with God has affected so many other parts of my life. Before, I saw having a relationship with God as a list of tasks--in my warped point of view and biases of being an already-too-task-minded person, if I wanted to know God, I needed to read the Bible, persevere in prayer, get involved in biblical community, and serve the church. If I did all these