How Stewardship Connects to Joy, Leadership, Balance, and Serendipity
By Richard Eyre

Editor's note: During the "first half" of this column, Richard Eyre outlined and defined “The Three Deceivers” of Control, Ownership, and Independence, and detailed how our obsessions with them can ruin the quality of our lives. Then, in the the second phase of the column, he replaced the deceivers with "The Three Alternatives" of SERENDIPITY, STEWARDSHIP, and "SYNERGICITY." (See the Alternatives Archive). Richard' is now well into the process of explaining each of the three Alternatives in detail. 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 the column two weeks ago) 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.

We talked last week about the power and poetry of a Stewardship attitude and about the added perception and perspective that comes to one who views the world through the "stewardship lens" rather than the "ownership lens." This week, let's look at how the Stewardship paradigm can affect our joy, our leadership, and our life balance. We will also tie the second alternative of Stewardship to the first alternative of Serendipity.

Then next week we can move to a discussion of exactly HOW to get ourselves thinking more as Stewards and less as Owners.

Stewardship and Joy

We lived in a ward once where the bishop was a relatively uneducated but a very wise and practical man. Professionally, he was a plumber, there was often dirt under his fingernails, and to those who were proud or judgmental, he did not make a great first impression.

Also in the ward there happened to be a highly trained and very expensive clinical psychiatric analyst. Certain ward members were going to this psychiatrist, seeking help with personal problems, particularly with depression. Some of them were also going to their bishop for counsel.

Many noticed that the plumber-bishop seemed to be rendering more help and having more effect than the expensive analyst. One person who noticed this was the analyst.

With some frustration, he went to the bishop one day and asked, “How do you do it. What technique do you use?” The humble bishop gave a simple answer. “I just keep asking and listening until I find out what commandment they are breaking — and then I tell them to stop.”

Joy is the result of righteousness. And joy (not happiness or pleasure) is also the measurement of how well and how faithfully we are living. The Egyptian god Osiris is said to ask only two questions to those who pass on: “Did you find joy?” and “Did you give joy?” An ancient rabbinical saying indicates that God asks those who die to give an accounting of “the things He made for them that they refused to enjoy.”

What keeps us from enjoying God’s gifts is the mistaken impression that we have earned them or that we own them. This notion encourages hoarding, over-protection and worry, and wipes away the gratitude and appreciative use of things that bring us joy.

Lehi tells Nephi (and us) that Adam fell that men might have joy. So whether the Osiris story and the rabbinical saying are valid or not, it does seem clear that what will be asked for on the other side is not a résumé or an accounting of worldly wealth or accomplishment, but a reporting on the joy we obtained and passed on from our stewardships.

Satan has contrived and concocted a great collection of false connections — connections between worldly things and joy, connections of the material with the beautiful, of outer circumstances with inner happiness. He has conned and confused many of us into connecting pretentious materialism with success and respect, and into thinking that we can win respect and peace through bigger homes, newer boats, more expensive cars.

Some feel that the pattern of pretension seems to grow from east to west. In New England (and more so in England and Europe) the exhibition of wealth is usually rather passé. Discreet people of means may spend money on fine art or education, but not on lavish, highly visible, public displays of wealth like ostentatious homes or expensive “toys.” The tendencies seem to move toward the reverse attitude as we move west.

Some people seem to have the capacity for deep, welling joy — the ability to be profoundly and emotionally moved by beauty, or by love, or by excellence and courage. These capacities are often muted and muffled by materialism.

“Seek not to be cumbered,” say the scriptures. When we are cumbered and heavy with the pride and weight of “too much,” it is hard to be moved or to find room or time for simple joy. It is easy to be moved if we are light. The accomplishments and excellence of others can move us if we are not jealous, and the simple beauties can move us if we see them as the great gifts they are.

The relationship between joy and stewardship is a direct and powerful one. Joy is the objective and stewardship is the vehicle. Joy is the goal and stewardship is the plan. Joy is the what and stewardship is the how.

Stewardship and Leadership

I have a friend who loves to talk about ideas. He has no interest in talking about people (he would call that gossip) and no interest in talking about the weather or everyday events (he would call that small talk). It’s not that he is uninterested in people, and he loves the weather — it’s just that ideas are what he likes to talk about.

Anyway, I love to take long drives with this friend of mine because the time is filled with the exploration of ideas. One day, on the way back from a trip, he said, “Why do you think that the meek will inherit the earth?” For the n ext several hours we worked on the question. Certainly leadership would be required to run the earth.

Is meekness a quality of leadership? That is certainly not the usual context. We identify leadership with assertiveness and aggressiveness. Aren’t these opposites of meekness? Wouldn’t the earth be inherited by those who had demonstrated leadership that included wisdom, intelligence, compassion, vision, courage, discipline, and love?

Yes, we decided, leadership included all of these, but great and trusted leadership included one thing more — one capstone quality that made all the other qualities work better and that allowed others to trust the leader enough to give him leadership over him, to entrust their destiny to him. This final, great quality, we decided, was meekness — defined as a humble dependency on God that would rely on the Spirit and thus avoid any unrighteous dominion or prideful dominance.

This kind of meekness is an attitude of stewardship. A leader who sees himself as a steward over those he leads will lead with gentleness, persuasion, and long-suffering. He will follow the leadership formula of the 121st section of the Doctrine and Covenants. He will acknowledge that God is the true leader and, as a steward, will try to do what God would do and care in the way God cares. Such a leader is the type that others will want to be led by, that others will entrust leadership to, and thus that will inherit the earth.

In the leadership sense, stewardship is like “shepherd-ship.” The shepherd, Christ’s most common leader metaphor, led his sheep rather than herding them, and cared for them as individuals rather than as a flock.

The attitude of stewardship is not the only quality of leadership, but it is the capstone quality — it is the factor that can help us to lead with the guidance of the true leader and that causes those we lead to trust our motives and to want to give us their support.

Most importantly, stewardship is the fundamental requirement for spiritual and priesthood leadership simply because all such leadership is God given and we know that he Lord increases and expands the leadership and responsibility of “good and faithful servants.”

One of the very most useful applications of a stewardship attitude is with regard to our families, and to the gospel leadership that parents exercise toward their children. A stewardship parent has clear goals for what he or she wants to give and to teach to his or her stewardship children. For further information on that kind of parenthood thinking, go to www.valuesparenting.com.

Stewardship and Balance (and being in the World but not of the World)

When Linda and I wrote our nationally published self-help book Lifebalance (Ballantine, Random House), we hoped it would be a manual and a guide for people who wanted techniques and methods for better balancing work, family, and personal needs.

To some extent, it has been so. But we’ve realized something. It’s not mental methods or temporal techniques that get people balanced. The desire to be balanced, to prioritize the things of eternal importance, doesn’t come from the mind. It must come from the spirit and from the heart. Several years later, I wrote Stewardship of the Heart.

If our hearts are turned to our children, to service, to true acceptance and honoring of stewardships from God, then we will remove the materialism and munch of the selfishness in life, replacing them with a spiritual balance.

So, as it turns out, I wrote the books in the wrong order. Stewardship of the Heart is the attitude that bring the guidance of the Spirit into our hearts and that give us the desire to balance our lives according to the Lord’s pattern. Lifebalance should have been a follow-up. It is the attitude of Stewardship that gives life true balance, and that allows us to be comfortable living in the world without being of the world.

I was a small boy, newly acquainted with tests and examinations in school, newly impressed with their gravity and seriousness. That was my position in the world when I first heard the Sunday School answer to the question, “Why are we here on this earth?”

As a test.

To me, as I suspect to so many others, that was a rather ominous answer. A test was something to be feared, something where someone checked to see if you could avoid mistakes and get everything right. God, then, wanted to test us and grade us so he made a place with a lot of hard questions and tough obstacles.

It took me many years to realize that this was a different kind of test, better named a gift of love and joy and endless possibility. If there is a test, it is to prove ourselves to ourselves, and to see how much of the joy we can find.

The “test mentality” leads some into thinking of the world only as an obstacle course, as evil-to-be-avoided, danger-to-beware-of. It is this defensive orientation that makes many try to escape the world — from monks who isolate themselves and try to cut off the physical world through vows of celibacy (misnamed vows of chastity) and vows of poverty, to everyday people who think the world is out to get them and who try in various ways to hide from it.

It is people of this type who misinterpret the marvelous and positive couplet, “be in the world but not of the world.” They take it as support for their view that the world is a bad and dangerous place to be feared and avoided.

Instead, we should think of the phrase as two separate and positive admonitions. “Be in the world” — be involved, partake and enjoy. “Be not of the world” — avoid the materialism and worldliness that can destroy the joy.

Thus interpreted, there is such power and balance in this little saying. Like a teeter-totter with righteous weight on each end, it can keep our lives in harmony and balance. On the one hand we’re advised to be in the world — to love and appreciated God’s incredible gifts, to care for all that we’ve been given stewardship over. On the other hand, we’re asked to rise above the misuse of mortal gifts that exist in a place made dangerous by the mixture of our agency and Satan’s tempting.

The couplet suggests an offense and a defense, a concentration on both doing good and avoiding evil, a challenge to seek the light side and shun the dark side. But above all, it is an invitation to put a positive interpretation on mortality, to live and to love as faithful, joyful stewards. Let me try to express this in a short poem:

In But Not Of

“Worldly”
“Sensuous”
“Temporal,” “Physical,” “Materialistic,” “Earthly.”
Words we use to describe what we hope we’re not.
Yet,
We “voted” for the temporal plan
And should shout for joy at the prospect of
a physical, material earth,
a world of senses and sensation.
We knew it would be a laboratory of learning,
Of expansion and expression,
Of freedom and faith.

Sad then,
If we hate the world, or hide from it;
If we fear passion or shut out what we came here to know.

Our “physicalness,” like
A horse’s power (capable of hurting us or running away with us)
Can be feared and killed
Or bridled and enjoyed.

A vow of poverty like
A vow of celibacy
Is an attempt to kill passion, to escape the world,
To abdicate stewardship.

“Be in the world but not of it”
should be read not as
“You have to be so try not to be”
but as two separate, joyful admonitions.

To make it so, we must remember that the world
Is not our master or our identity…but our gift,
That we are spiritual beings entering, experiencing, enjoying
A physical extension of ourselves.

We must bridle, we must use with discipline – like disciples,
And most of all, we must remember
Who it all belongs to.
Remembering this, and understanding and loving
Our role as stewards,
Makes it impossible to be “of the world”
And equally impossible not to find the joy of being “in it.”

Stewardship and Serendipity

For many years, I have been giving a lecture called Serendipity to corporate and business groups. I was in the process of writing about Serendipity of the Spirit, which I saw as a companion idea to Stewardship of the Heart, and had defined the word as “a state of mind whereby a person is sensitive and aware enough to find something good while seeking something else.” The message of the book is that one can be structured and spontaneous, disciplined and flexible — if we can develop a serendipity attitude.

One night, I found myself in a rural setting, giving my serendipity seminar to a group that consisted mostly of farmers. I sensed as I spoke that this group either didn’t “get it” or else they needed it less than the groups I was used to.

A farmer came up afterward and convinced me that it was the latter. “I enjoyed your speech,” he said, “and I hadn’t ever heard the word ‘serendipity’ before. But you know, farmers are sort of naturally that way — we have to be.” He explained that, as a farmer, he had plans of what he would like to do in a certain day, but the weather and natural conditions forced flexibility and observing them often caused him to shift h is attention to a more pressing need or a more “do-able” project. “You can’t just act on a farm,” he said, “You’ve got to learn to re-act as well.”

I had also mentioned stewardship in the lecture and he had a quick comment there, too. “Farmers mostly know they are stewards,” he said. “Anyone who really thinks about it knows that the land is God’s, as is the water and the wind. It’s our land just to use and to care for.”

I drove home that night thinking that I now better understood Brigham Young’s advice to stay close to the soil and his warning that professions more than one step removed from the farm were spiritually dangerous.

I also left with a better understanding of the connections between my two favorite words.

Stewardship and serendipity — two eleven-letter S words that symbolize the two attitudes I want most to live by. The words are linked in many ways. Serendipity requires spiritual awareness and guidance from the Spirit (that we might see what God wants us to do and what unexpected ways He has prepared for us — even as we are pursuing some other worthwhile goal). This same guidance also lies in the heart of stewardship where we acknowledge that we must be guided by the owner if we are to be good stewards over His things.

The acknowledgment of our status as stewards causes us to seek the very guidance that brings about spiritual serendipity or the awareness of what God wants us to do. And the consistent pursuit of guidance and of awareness of the serendipitous directions God may have in mind for us is the best way to become worthy and effective stewards.

As our stewardships increase and expand, so does our need for spiritual serendipity. If our assignments, or entrustments, or callings, are very basic (like simple times tables in a math class), then perhaps we can do them or care for them in a rather routine, self-reliant way. But we want to get beyond “basic arithmetic’ into higher and freer forms, and the greater our stewardships, become the more we need spiritual serendipity or an open, sensitive attitude in which the Spirit can show us purer, stronger, more creative ways to multiply and magnify what we have been entrusted with.

Try to imagine how the Lord might view one of us as we sat down to set our goals and make our plans. Perhaps He would smile as He observed. Part of His smile might be His approval of our efforts to decide what we want to do and what we want to contribute. And part of His smile might be His amusement in how little we know of what is in store for us and therefore how incomplete our plans usually are.

If we seek to know and understand the stewardships we have been given, and if we seek to have the constant, serendipity-like guidance of the Spirit in magnifying those stewardships — then perhaps His smile will also reflect His pleasure in our faithfulness.

Next Week

It's one thing to talk about what Stewardship is, and how looking at life through a Stewardship lens can help us see more clearly and perceive things as they really are. What is even harder, though, is actually developing a Stewardship attitude within ourselves, so that Stewardship becomes part of who we are rather than just part of what we understand. That is the task of next week's column, when we will explore three keys to developing a true and personal Stewardship orientation to life.

Again, if you would like a signed copy of Richard's book Stewardship of the Heart, write to Richard@meridianmagazine.com. If you are interested in the stewardship approach to parenting, visit www.valuesparenting.com.

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