What We Don't Own and What We Do

Something I wondered about during the powwow I went to last night was the idea of ownership, particularly regarding the Earth. God gave us this Earth to live on, but He didn't give us the Earth to keep. We don't own the land. No one does. The Earth belongs to God, and someday, He will take it back, renovate it, and give it (or perhaps lend it?) only to those who are worthy, regardless of who "owns" the land at the time when Jesus returns. But this, perhaps, has interesting implications that go far beyond real estate.

Since we don't own the land, we also don't own the fruit of the land, including plants, fuel, and precious metals. Arguably, we don't own animals, either, whether because they count as "fruit of the land" or because "you are what you eat," and they eat the fruit of the land.

But if that's true, then that means that we also don't own ourselves. Our bodies are made of earthly elements. If we don't own the earthly elements, we don't own our bodies, either. To me, this almost seems like a step too far. Of course we own ourselves. God gave us our bodies as a gift. We get to keep them. But that's not quite right. It's not so much that we keep our bodies, but that we get them back. And even then, it's not so much that we get our bodies back, but that we get new ones. Perhaps these bodies are only rentals, ours to use during the rental period, but destined to "return to the earth" after the rental period is over. God will give us bodies we can keep, but these bodies probably aren't them.

All this, taken together, means that we don't even own the fruits of our own hands. Whatever we make, we own neither the raw materials from which they were made nor the tools we used to make them. We own next to nothing.

I say "next to nothing" because I can think of one thing we own. We own our own minds. We may not own the brains that house our intelligence, but we own the intelligence housed therein. We own our spirits because our spirits are what we are. We are our spirits, and we own ourselves. We may not own our bodies, but we own whatever else makes us us. We own our thoughts, our memories, our ideas, and our personality traits. We own all the intangible things that make us who we are.

So, it's not quite true that we don't own anything, but we own less than we think. Most of the things we think we own are things that we are merely borrowing or being stewards over. It may be possible to exchange stewardships of particular things, which seems to be what happens when we "buy" or "sell" things that we don't actually own, but ultimately, all those things belong to God, and He'll eventually want them back.

Eventually, we'll have bodies that we own and, if we're faithful, entire universes that we own, but in the meantime, we own our minds, and that's about it.