In my ninth grade English class, we started out the year of studying ancient texts by reading the Bible "as literature". In a class that September while we were still engaged in the book of Genesis, we were greeted with a pop quiz: "Are you your sister's keeper? Discuss."
I don't remember what I discussed, but I know how I answered the question: "Yes." The concept of stewardship -- the idea that we are given sacred responsibility for others because of our choices, our roles or our gifts -- is a central tenet of my belief system. Our interconnectivity is, I believe, the hardest thing about living on this earth and the defining condition of our experience here. Through our relationships, we learn how to love, how to be selfless, how to take responsibility for our choices, and how to forgive.
Those are not things that come naturally to us poor humans. In my own life, I know that I have had to make conscious choices about who I want to be and what qualities I want to act on; natural goodness is inherent in so very few of us. But in making the choice to be my sister's keeper -- to be a steward, responsible for the health, safety, spiritual growth of a husband, parent, child or friend -- my commitment to that choice dictates my behavior. I choose who I want to be, and then I behave in a way that brings that person into being.
Not the other way around. What if we all went around behaving whatever way our baser inclinations dictate and then relied solely on those actions to craft our identities? It sounds silly when put in such terms: the challenge for the individual human spirit becomes not rising above those actions that hurt and tear down, but actually seeing to what degree we can revel in them. In the name of individuality, Jon Gosselin tells an interviewer, "I just looked in the mirror one morning and decided I no longer wanted to be that person." Really, Jon? With nine other people's lives intertwined with your own, depending on your stewardship?
It is so out of fashion to subdue selfish personal desires in the name of a greater good. But I love the reasoning of Elder D. Todd Christofferson in my church's General Conference on Sunday: "Mere wanting is hardly a proper guide for moral conduct." There have been many things I have done in my life because I believed they would lead me to the kind of person I want to be, not because I was already that person. Even though I answered an emphatic "Yes" to my ninth grade teacher's (and God's) question, I chose three small children so that I could learn what stewardship means in practice. They demand a lot of who I am now, but they are essential to who I want to be.
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