Being Good Stewards — By John Reed

Being Good Stewards
Stewardship. Whenever that word comes up in sermons, the subject of tithing is sure to follow. The scriptural command to give one tenth of your earnings to the church provides material support, but that’s only one sense of what stewardship really means.
In business, stewardship first and foremost means taking care of your customers. But it shouldn’t stop there: good business owners take care of their workers too, and all the behind the scenes strategies that make the business run smoothly.
Sometimes it’s seemingly little things. One of my favorite local places finally replaced the broken light switch in their restroom after many years. Another place recently changed hands, but they still haven’t fixed the huge broken wall clock behind the cash register. Little things matter.
On a larger scale, mankind has a mandate to be good stewards of the land. We’ve not done a very good job of that, especially out West.
Managing land and wildlife doesn’t mean simply leaving it alone to fend for itself. It’s too late for that. Humanity has impacted every square inch of land, air, and water on the planet one way or another, so good management now means at times undoing the damage we’ve already done.
The yearly fires we’re seeing now in California and elsewhere are not the result of climate change. It’s our own fault. Poor stewardship in the guise of environmentalism run amok has prevented managed burns to reduce understory cover and other strategies have left decades of fuel just waiting to burn.
Here in Georgia, some genius thought importing a bunch of white tail deer would be a good thing. But without any natural predators to keep them in check, the deer population has grown to where they’re a pest and a major road hazard.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m an environmentalist too, within reason. But we cannot simply leave our world alone and unmanaged. We’ve already done the damage, it’s time to fix it.