When a neighbor lends us a ladder or a good casserole dish, we handle it with more care than we give our own things. It stays somewhere safe, and it goes back cleaner than it came, because it belongs to someone who trusted us with it.

Right?

Sometimes, we get busy though and it goes back later than planned. A week becomes a month, the ladder stays in the garage, and we reach for it whenever a job comes up, until somewhere along the way it stops being the neighbor’s ladder.. Returning it starts to feel awkward, so it stays a little longer, and the longer it stays the more it feels like ours.

If the neighbor finally asks for it, there can be a small sting in handing it over, as though something is being taken from us, even though we both know whose it was.

The tenants in the parable Jesus tells this Sunday are given a vineyard and begin to treat it, and everything it produces, as their own. When the owner’s servants arrive, they meet them as people who have come to take something away rather than return what is not theirs.

I find the story uncomfortable because it describes something that happens gradually, and yet even a tangible thing like a ladder, which should be easy to remember as borrowed because its owner lives down the street, can become ‘unborrowed.’ The things God lends us have no name written on the side, so the hours of our days and the people in our lives begin to feel like ours.

When the dish goes back with something in it, the neighbor knows what that something means, which is thank you. What God has lent us goes back the same way, as a meal on someone’s table, an afternoon given to a friend, or a skill used for the person who needed it, and he receives each one as thanks.

This week’s invitation: Choose one thing God has given you, such as a skill, an hour, or a recipe you’re good at, and put it into someone else’s hands before Sunday. Then tell God it came from him. That is how what we’ve been given reaches other people.