"The Gift We Carry Forward" - 01/12/2026

This past Sunday felt like the beginning of something tender and important for us at Vincent. Launching “The Gift We Carry Forward” around Psalm 24:1, I could sense how many of us carry a mix of gratitude, anxiety, questions, and even old stories about money and giving. In the first week of the series, we slowed down enough to notice our habits and assumptions, and we named a central tension: living like owners versus living like stewards. I keep coming back to the heart of the campaign, that stewardship is how gratitude becomes ministry, and I find myself praying about who God is shaping us to be with everything we have been given.


Scripture
“The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”
- Psalm 24:1  NIV


Reflection
There is a quiet freedom hidden inside Psalm 24:1. The verse does not argue or negotiate. It simply rests the whole world back into God’s hands. The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it. Not only what is beautiful and abundant, but also what feels complicated and scarce. Even the uneasy places in the human heart are held within that “everything.”

Ownership often begins with fear. It tightens the grip. It measures, compares, defends.
 Ownership whispers that security is something to be achieved, protected, and controlled. Yet stewardship begins somewhere else. Stewardship begins in belonging. It confesses that life is received before it is managed. Breath arrives as gift. Time opens like a door. Strength, skill, income, relationships, and opportunities come wrapped in mystery and mercy.

Gratitude, then, is not merely a feeling that visits when things are going well. Gratitude is an awakening to reality. It is the soul recognizing that it lives by grace. When gratitude deepens, it often becomes movement. It becomes the desire to participate in God’s generosity, not out of guilt, but out of alignment. What is received becomes shared. What is held becomes offered. What is possessed becomes entrusted.

Stewardship asks a gentler question than “How much is mine?” It asks, “Who is God forming us to be with what has been placed in our care?” A steward does not pretend there is no cost. A steward is honest about limits, bills, responsibilities, and the pressures of daily life. But even in those realities, stewardship learns to pray with open hands. It chooses trust over scarcity. It chooses purpose over accumulation. It chooses ministry shaped by gratitude.

I recall my younger years, watching my mother prepare for guests with a kind of quiet devotion. Without making a speech about it, she would bring out what was best, fruit carefully chosen, plates set neatly, the table made ready as if love itself needed a place to sit down. It was never about showing off abundance. It was about honoring relationship, offering welcome, letting gratitude take visible form. That memory returns when stewardship feels abstract. Giving can be like that table, simple and intentional, a way of making room for God’s work and for one another, so that gratitude does not remain hidden in the heart but becomes lived hospitality.

In this season, stewardship can be held as a spiritual practice of remembering. Remembering whose the earth is. Remembering that all we carry forward was first carried to us by grace. And then, little by little, letting gratitude become ministry.


Prayer
God of all gifts,
the earth is yours, and so are we.
Quiet the anxious grasp in the heart.
Teach a steadier trust, and a clearer joy.
Shape gratitude into faithful action,
so that what is entrusted becomes blessing,
and what is given becomes love made visible.
Amen.