David, the Psalmist, summed it up when he wrote:
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. (Psalm 24:1)
The fact is, none of the land and nothing else we possess is really ours. Not even our own body is really ours. It is all God’s. God made the entire universe and everything in it”including us. Among ourselves we agree that we own things for a shorter or longer time, and we agree (or should agree) that we each have control over our own body. But in reality God owns everything, rules everything, and even keeps everything in existence moment by moment, from eternity to eternity.
A gift from God. We don’t own anything. Everything we have is a gift from God.
And it is not the sort of gift that God gives to us and then it becomes ours to hold onto. It is the sort of gift that God is continually giving us. It is like water running out of a faucet. If the flow were cut off at the source, it would run through our fingers and be gone.
We think material things are so solid, so permanent, so real. We can touch them and hold onto them. They are solid, stable, dependable.
And yet, all of these seemingly solid things around us are made of trillions upon trillions of tiny little atoms that have practically no substance to them. They are made of infinitesimally small particles”or perhaps just waves”zipping around in a vast amount of empty space and creating force fields that we feel as solid matter. If the energy powering them were taken away, if their motion were stopped, they would instantly collapse into nothing, and that seemingly solid chair that you are sitting on would simply vanish.
The energy behind them is God’s love.
(Extracted from The Myth of Ownership: A Thanksgiving Reflection by Lee Woofenden)
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