We’ve all been given many and varied allotments – discrete gifts to be cultivated and used. These allotments take many forms, two of the most obvious being time, and money. I believe the allotments we each have at our disposal are given to us by God, not be wasted or allowed to rest dormant, but rather to be used for the good of our neighbour and for the glory of God. Neighbour is meant in the broadest sense of the word; our neighbour is not just the person living next door to us. Our neighbour could be a close friend, or a stranger on the street; it is the person before us or alongside us in any situation or context of life.

How do we use our allotments for the glory of God? We recognise that every good thing we have is a gift, and we use whatever we have received in such a way as to consistently point back to the goodness of the giver. We recognise and appreciate the gift, but we enjoy and make much more of the giver. That means we don’t use our allotments selfishly; we recognise that whatever we have is not just for us. Our allotments are not to waste, or to leave dormant; neither are they for us to keep and accumulate for ourselves. But rather they are to share for the good of others too – this is the principle of responsible stewardship.

I believe we each have a responsibility to recognise our finitude, and to steward our allotments accordingly.

Time is one allotment that we all have, the measure of which none of us can know. Life can surprise us, both with its incredible resilience and stubborn longevity, and with its sometimes-sudden brevity and fragility. Either way, time does not stand still. There is not an endless supply of time – making it one of the most valuable allotments we have, and therefore one of the most valuable things we can give.

Our allotment of financial resource is also limited. Regardless of how much financial resource and capacity we each have today, it will one day be meaningless. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.” Birth and death are great levellers: every one of us came with nothing, and every one of us will return with nothing. No matter how much we might each manage to accumulate in between these two events, empty handed we arrived, and empty handed we will leave.

We each have an allotment of financial resource to use during our limited allotment of time. There will be a day when we will have no more opportunity to use our allotments to do good, so let’s use what we have all the while we can.

Let’s help one another to identify the many and diverse allotments we each have, and encourage one another to use those allotments collectively for the good of our neighbours, and for the glory of God.