Stewardship for a Better Life – a reflection on 2020

As I reflect on 2020, I’m struck by the resounding salience of the principle of stewardship. When we think about stewardship, we often think about roles and positions that involve looking after people or things, whether staff, businesses, animals, plants or even the environment itself. Stewardship is associated with accountability – the expectation that someone, or a group of people (such as a board of directors), will periodically ask the person holding a position of stewardship to give an account of that stewardship.

Stewardship in the context of self-governance, however, is different. To whom are you accountable for the life you live? Who is the board of directors to whom you report with an account of your contributions in your home, your community and the wider world? Who really cares to know in any great detail how you’re taking care of yourself or your relationships in the governance of your life? And who really should care? 

In the context of self-governance, stewardship means voluntarily taking on responsibility to care for someone or something. (The first ‘someone’ is Self: well-being, character, competence.) Stewardship, in its purest form, is love in action and cannot be imposed upon anyone by an external party. The steward must take the mantle of stewardship upon themselves, ultimately becoming accountable to themselves for the life that they live – that is the way of effective self-governance, overcoming the distractions, temptations and challenges of the day that can so easily knock us off course.

Can you imagine a world in which more leaders and citizens are committed to the principle of stewardship in the governance of their own lives? Can you imagine how much pain would be spared and how much more joy would be had (far transcending the immediate pleasures that are so readily available)?

Can you imagine how much healthier and stronger we’d be as individuals (in body, mind, heart and spirit) and how much more purposeful, meaningful and fulfilling our lives would be? Can you imagine how much more prosperous our communities would be? Can you imagine how much more effective and sustainable our institutions and businesses would be? And what about the ensuing improvements to the natural environment?

I can imagine all of these things, because I’ve seen the transformative power of stewardship in my own life and in the lives of those who work with me. And as we face the evils of our day, I cannot think of a more apt principle than stewardship to empower us, individually and collectively, to overcome and prosper.

If you’d like to know more about how the principle of stewardship can improve your experience of life, in every respect, then feel free to email me: tom@3stewardships.com.

All the best for 2021,

Tom.