The first few months, Mr Campbell swept the verandah every morning. He watered the crotons, ran the taps once a week so the pipes would not seize, opened the windows on dry days and sent a short voice note to the owners in Hartford every Sunday: “All good here. Rain last night, no leaks.”
By the second year the voice notes had become occasional. By the third, the yard had grown up, the owners’ nephew was using the back room when he was “passing through”, and nobody had checked the roof since the last storm. When the owners finally came home for a funeral, they found water stains across the dining-room ceiling and a stranger’s clothes in the wardrobe.
Mr Campbell is a composite, but most families with relatives abroad will recognise him. The arrangement is one of the quiet foundations of Caribbean life: a house back home, owners in the UK, the US or Canada, and someone local, a relative, a neighbour, a paid caretaker, minding the place in between visits. Sometimes it works beautifully for decades. Sometimes it slowly comes apart.
The servant who decided there was time
Jesus told a parable that fits this situation uncomfortably well. A master puts a servant in charge of his household while he is away. If the servant is faithful, the master will reward him. “But if that servant says in his heart, ‘My master is delaying his coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and be drunk,” then the master will come on a day he does not expect (Luke 12:45–46).
What is striking is where the trouble begins. Not with the mistreatment, or the drinking. It begins with a thought: my master is taking a long time. The servant does not decide to be unfaithful. He decides that nobody is coming to check, and the rest follows.
Anyone who has minded someone else’s property will know that drift. At first, the owner’s absence feels like trust. Over time it can start to feel like permission. The standards slip a little. The house starts to feel like yours, or like nobody’s.
A word to caretakers
If you are the one holding the keys, the parable is a gentle but serious reminder. Delay reveals character. The way you care for a house in the third quiet year says more than the way you cared for it in the first busy month.
Faithfulness in this role is usually not dramatic. It looks like keeping the routine even when no one asks: clearing the gutters before the rains, checking the ceilings after a storm, sending honest updates including the bad news, and not letting others use the house without the owner’s knowledge. It means keeping receipts for every repair. It means saying clearly when the job has become too much, rather than letting it slide.
A word to owners abroad
The parable is about the servant, but it has something to say to the master too, or at least to modern owners who are far from home. The master in the story left clear responsibility and intended to return. Many owners abroad leave neither.
Consider how many arrangements are made on a handshake at the airport. “Just look after the place for me, nuh.” No agreement on what “looking after” involves. No budget for repairs. No payment, or a payment that has not changed in ten years. No regular contact. Then, years later, disappointment and accusations when the house is not as it was left.
Fairness runs both ways. Owners who want faithful caretakers can do their part:
- Write it down. Even a one-page note of what is expected: how often to visit, what to check, who may stay, what to do in a storm.
- Pay fairly and reliably. A relative doing a favour is still giving their time. Scripture’s concern that labourers receive their wages applies to cousins too.
- Fund the upkeep. Agree a small repair budget so problems are fixed when they are small, instead of waiting for your approval from abroad.
- Stay in touch. A regular call, photos, the occasional video walk-through. Not as surveillance, but as partnership.
- Visit when you can. A house that is visited is cared for differently from one that is only imagined.
We are all caretakers
Behind the parable is a larger point that applies to every homeowner, wherever they live. Christians have long understood that nothing we hold is entirely ours. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness” (Psalm 24:1). The house we own, the land we inherited, the flat we rent: all are held in trust for a while.
That makes the ordinary disciplines of home life, fixing what is broken, paying what is owed, treating tenants and workers fairly, not neglecting the roof because nobody will notice, part of something bigger. The owner may be far away. The reckoning may seem distant. But faithfulness is measured in the long, quiet middle, not only at the moment of return.
When the owners from Hartford finally sat down with Mr Campbell, the conversation was painful. But it ended better than it began. They admitted they had never paid him properly or told him clearly what they needed. He admitted he had let things go. They wrote a new arrangement on a sheet of paper at the dining table, under the stained ceiling, and shook hands on it. The following Sunday, a voice note arrived: “Roofer coming Tuesday. Will send pictures.”
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