Two women I know recently reinforced for me a powerful reality about spiritual stewardship. The most sacred trusts that we’re given as humans, even our own souls, it seems, are actually “on loan.”

I recall how shocked I was to discover the fiercely protective, almost overwhelming maternal instincts that kick in after a child joins your family. Although some chalk this up to hormones, I’ve seen it activated in parents who’ve welcomed children through adoption, so it must be a more complex matter.

And just as parents are often seized with this intense instinct that wants to hold on, they also have to find the inner ability to let go if those children they love are ever going to have a full life. As Khalil Gibran so sagely observed, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you they belong not to you.”

One friend found that Gibran’s words took on new meaning after a trip to the children’s room of her local library. When she arrived home with her armload of picture books, they caused as much delighted fuss as those she’d previously ordered from a children’s book club. But the difference with these books was that she and her kids were much more conscious that they were borrowed and would need to be responsibly cared for during the time they were with this family.

“I suddenly had a whole new view of just what parenthood truly implies,” she said. “The care we show for what’s been “loaned” to us, the humility required to treat such relationships like a borrowed trust, means everything.” When her children are eventually “returned,” she’d like to think that they’ll be “a bit well-worn with hugs” and also the obvious recipients of good listening and attention that they’ll in turn be able to show to others.

Although it isn’t always the case, Our human nature usually wants to take better care of something that we know must be returned and for which we’ll be held accountable. This could be our children, or it could also be jobs entrusted to us, or even our own bodies.

Another friend, also a mother, came to understand this concept much earlier in her family’s life than she ever expected to. Her first child was born at 23 weeks and she watched him live out his entire life span in two months in a neonatal nursery before she had to say goodbye to him. Today, as the mother of an adopted child and another biological child also born prematurely, she sees those two months as a very significant lifetime, an extremely important “loan term.”

While this baby was so sick and struggling to live, his mother was physically, emotionally and spiritually at one of the lowest ebbs of her life. The baby’s very circumstances precluded her from doing much of anything for him in terms of physical interaction or care, although she dutifully pumped her breast milk to feed him. She says that what she gave this small life shared with her for such a short time was something she hadn’t yet been able to find in herself, and I think that’s a true metaphor for what the most significant part of any kind of loving is really all about.

The resolution of the pain of helplessness and hopelessness she inevitably felt during those months came when she realized just what Gibran is saying, that greater forces send our children to us, and it’s the way that we respond to that with truth and love, whatever our circumstances, that is the greatest thing we can do as a parent.

Her expression of that truth and love was to show up at the hospital every day, several times a day, and let herself fall in love with someone she knew she wouldn’t have in her life for very long, and allow for whatever exchange they could share. She learned to let herself feel and honor every bit of the pain she was experiencing and at the same time, not miss the joy and sweetness her little son had brought with him.

Although she knows that she was the one who needed to learn and accept the fact that we’re designed to embrace both joy and pain and thereby live our days more fully, this is also a very important lesson for children to receive from parents. We have a lot of anguish, struggle, and addiction today because in a culture that fears age, death, difficulty and disability, children usually don’t see this modeled.

This concept of children being “borrowed” reaches outside the span of our families, too, as each of us essentially shows up in others’ lives like a gift on loan from life. Every interaction we have holds the potential to enhance the possibilities in this, or to lose them.

And all parents benefit from others’ interaction in honoring the trust that is our children. My friend with the stack of library books is a single mom, as well as a doctor, and every bit of interest and involvement that others show toward her family feels like treating precious objects with care. The mother of that little baby who died so soon was awfully lonely in those days she went back and forth to visit him. Things as simple as mowing her lawn or driving her to the hospital, let alone actually stopping to just be with her and listen, became more important than any job, achievements, or belongings ever could.

No matter what our beliefs, viewing all children, and each other, as belonging to something greater than any of us seems like an awfully good place to lay the foundation for a world that might, finally, find its way to peace. Because after all, this planet is really only on loan to us, too.