Its a Rental

I need some energetic music when working out.  I put on Switchfoot's wonderful Vice Verses.  The final track is Where I Belong.

The song chews over themes that the writer to the Hebrews meditates on, in chapter 11,

These...acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.  People who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland...they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

This sense of  longing permeates much Christian spirituality (and rightly so). But it can overflow into seeing this present world - this body, this creation - as defective, second-rate, not worth taking seriously.  The lyric that brought me up short was

I'm not sentimental
This skin and bones is a rental
And no one makes it out alive

 "It's a rental"... Yes, it's true. The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof... human "dominion" just means managing, for a while, something with which I have been entrusted by another.  But "it's a rental" can also connote, "I don't have to take good care of it.  It doesn't really count".

I wonder what the band had in mind.  In Jesus' parables (e.g. Luke 19:12f), how the steward takes care of the master's property counts for everything.