The Borrowed Cottage on Lake Windermere

When Sarah Thornton agreed to house-sit a seventeenth-century cottage on the shores of Lake Windermere in England's Lake District, the owner left just one instruction: "Love this place the way I love it."

At first, Sarah thought she could do whatever she pleased. She was alone, after all. But something shifted the morning she found the owner's journal on the kitchen shelf — decades of entries about every stone repaired, every garden bed tended, every windowpane replaced by hand. This cottage was not just property. It was someone's life's work, entrusted to her care.

Sarah stopped leaving dishes in the sink. She wiped her boots before crossing the threshold. She kept the fire burning at the right temperature to protect the old plaster walls. Not because of rules posted on the door, but because she understood whose house she was living in.

Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 6 carry that same weight. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." Every believer is living in a dwelling that belongs to Someone else — Someone who paid not with silver or sweat equity, but with His own blood. The Holy Spirit has taken up residence in these bodies of ours. Not everything we could do with them is worth doing. Not every freedom serves the One who bought us. When we grasp the staggering cost of our redemption, honoring God with our bodies stops feeling like obligation. It starts feeling like the only reasonable response to such an extraordinary gift.