I woke up this morning with a word on my mind. The word was “mine.” What does it mean that something is “mine.” It struck me that there are a variety of things that are spoken of as mine. This key is mine. This wife is mine. This God is mine.

The key is physically mine. Or is it? It is the key to the car (mine!) and so it has a relationship to the car. Indeed, the key is useless without the car, and the car is useless without the key. The relationship the key has to the car really makes the key the car’s. As a unit, then, they are both mine. My relationship to the key has a built in relationship to the car as well. But it is a physical relationship of me to “thing.”

My wife is mine, but in a very much looser way than the car. My wife is a separate person with her own relationships, only one of which is me. She is not useless without me and I am not useless without her. Our relationship is a more interdependence than an ownership relationship, unlike the car and key.

My God is mine, but only in a relationship in which I am dependent for my very existence on Him. As is everything else that is kept in existence by the power or force of a creator. More accurately, I am His. I guess an artist in creating a painting always has a relationship to it as its creator even after he gives it up to others and it leaves him physically.

My nephew, when he was little, saw and internalized the J.C. Nichols statue in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. He referred to it as “Mine fountain.” And in a way, it was. And though he is now over 40, I hope he still has the internal relationship with that fountain in his memory. Our memories seem to maintain all the relationships we form with things, persons, and bits of knowledge, words, images, and sounds.

As I get older I find myself craving less and less. I don’t really need things to be mine. I am starting to think of my being theirs. Except for money. That’s mine.