Midweek Musing- 8/21/24 The Lanyard

I do not often talk specifically about stewardship of money and fundraising. This congregation is blessed with generous givers and financial resources from previous generations of faithful followers.

Instead, I talk more often about what for lack of a formal term I would describe as lifestyle stewardship.

The definition I have about this type of stewardship is that all of our lives should be lived in service to God and that there is nothing in this life including our very breath that is truly ours.

Thus, our time, talents, resources, money, and even more should be used in what the Westminster Catechism (which to my 5th grade Sunday School teachers dismay I never memorized) describes as our chief end – “which is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Thus, it is not just our money God wants its our heart. Of course, quite often where our money is where will find much of our heart as well.

One of the things though that we sometimes in our arrogance believe is that we can ever give enough to pay back or reimburse God for what we have been given.

Of course, no payment can ever match all given – especially when compared to the gift of Jesus whose death and resurrection assures us that we will never be separated from the love of God.

I recently came across the poem below that reminded me of this. It is entitled the Lanyard and written by Billy Collins. I hope it speaks to you as it did me.

The Lanyard

By Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

“The Lanyard” from The Trouble With Poetry: and Other Poems by Billy Collins, 2005