From time to time I have borrowed a tool or machine from a friend. I must confess to doing so with some hesitation. The likelihood of it breaking while I am using it seems pretty high. Like the time a dump truck clutch went out while at the landfill. This was not a pretty sight. Imagine tossing off debris by hand in a smelly landfill with trucks and big machines speeding all around the helpless victim.

Borrowing something is sometimes necessary. When I have been a position to loan a seldom used tool, I get great pleasure from it. After all, it is just sitting there— better to be used than rust away.

That being said, the problem with using someone’s stuff is the responsibility to return it in better shape than you first got it. I learned this from my mother.

You see, my mother and I shared a car during my teen years. No, I did not drive mama’s car as my car-possessing high school friends suggested. Well, actually I did. And there were some rules.

1. The gas tank must have as much gas in it when I returned as when I left.

2. It must be cleaner when I returned it than when I borrowed it.

3. All accidents and possible damage was to be reported upon returning home so as not to cause a problem for the next user of the vehicle.

These were not hard rules for a teenage boy to understand. They were not as easy to follow. I confess to breaking all of them from time to time, although probably not all at the same time.

I came full circle when my children started driving my car. We had the same rules and they followed them, for the most part. However, the conversation about returning it better than borrowing it as a way of showing appreciation for the loan did happen from time to time. I can only hope it sunk in.

Later when my son was driving his own freshly washed, waxed and cleaned car through the Bojangles drive through, he absent-mindedly tossed the wrapper from the straw out the window. When I called him on it, he said he didn’t want to mess up his car.

When I finished my sandwich, I tossed the wrapper on the floor of his car. As you can imagine, he was not happy and asked my why I did that to his prized possession.

I replied, “I will tell you why I did that in your car when you tell me why you threw trash on God’s creation. What is the difference in you trashing the earth and me trashing your car?” He got the point.

The recent oil spill is just another in the long list of atrocities visited on creation by we who are borrowing it for a short while. The issue is more complicated than we could ever hope to unpack in this forum. So, maybe we might just start with an understanding.

Most of the world’s religions have a belief that the inhabitants of the planet are guests. We are not the creator or owner. Rather we are stewards, caretakers who may use the bounty here as we preserve it in honor of the creator’s gift to us and for the benefit of those who will come after us.

In a sense, we are to leave it better than we found it as a way of saying "thank you” for the loan. Not to do so is to dismiss the value of the gift and the Giver.

The consequences of a straw wrapper out the window and millions of barrels of oil in the sea are not comparable but the questions still remain. Whose planet is it and are we leaving it better than we found it? And how do we say “thank you” for the gift and to the Giver? The answer: leave it better, cleaner and greener than we found it.