Well, we’ve had a week. And it’s ending with our dog needing to have one of his eyes removed. I’ll spare you the details.
But, even in all that, I still wanted to get a brief reflection out there about this Sunday’s Gospel reading. It even loosely ties into the dog business that has consumed so much of my waking and sleeping thoughts.
To boil it all down: None of this world actually belongs to us. Not my sweet dog, not my joyful (or not so joyful when certain math problems get tricky) children, not my home, not my husband, not even my own life. None of this big, wide, beautiful, messy world belongs to me. Nor, I’m sorry to say, does it belong to you. All of what we have belongs to God.
In this Gospel passage, Jesus lays out the whole of humanity’s reality in a few brief sentences.
There was a landowner who planted a vineyard,
Matthew 21:33
put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower.
Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.
God created the world and everything in it. He then gave it to His most beautiful creations, humans, to be stewards over what He had made. And while the parable mentions a journey, we know that God has not walked away from His creation to leave us to struggle on our own. It is, after all, a parable and meant to illustrate a point. The point here is that God, the land owner, has given the tenants, aka us, the ability to freely choose how to live in the vineyard.
If we really, truly, take this to heart, it has some important implications in our relationships with others and with the wider world around us. It’s the whole, “With great power comes great responsibility,” moment. Both my husband and I have really felt the weight of these words as we have struggled in discerning how to best help our aging dog, Max.
Max is 13 and we discovered last week he was having eye concerns. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get detailed here. Suffice to say that after many, many different eye drops and antibiotics, he was still in a great deal of pain and even had to go to the vet emergency room. We found ourselves Thursday morning deciding between trying to save the eye (with a hefty price tag) at a pet hospital 1.5 hours away next week, or taking it out today and ending his misery. We have never had to make a decision like this before and I am still emotionally exhausted from the experience. All we wanted to do is to minimize his pain and maintain the highest quality of life he can have while also not going into debt. I desperately wanted for someone else to tell us what to do. But we are Max’s owners, and in bringing him into our family God had entrusted him to our care.
There is a delicate balance being played out here. Max belongs to us, we determine what care he receives. Yet at the end of the day, we have to be able to answer to God how we cared for His creature. The same logic can be applied to our children, to our bodies, and to anyone or anything we find under our earthy authority. God does not swoop in and lay out how each choice should be handled (wouldn’t it be nice sometimes though?). But He does give us the grace to make those decisions. At the end of time, or the end of our earthly life, we will need to be able to offer an accounting of how well we fulfilled our vocation as a steward over creation.
I’m happy to say Max is doing well and the kids are already planning pirate-themed costumes for Halloween. My favorite ideas so far are either: A. Max is the pirate captain and we are all his crew, or B. Max is the pirate and we dress Nathan (the 2 year old) up like a parrot to be his sidekick. Both options crack me up!
Daily Graces 