As stewards, we ultimately answer only to our master. It does not matter what the world or even what other Christians think of our stewardship. Our goal should be to be welcomed into the joy of our master as a good and faithful servant. To hear the words “Well done”. Not “well thought” or “well believed” but “well done”. Every decision that we make should be based on its effect on this one final result.

C.S. Lewis says this brilliantly in his essay “The Worlds Last Night”

We have all encountered judgments or verdicts on ourselves in this life. Every now and then we discover what our fellow creatures really think of us. I don’t of course mean what they tell us to our faces: that we usually have to discount. I am thinking of what we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions about us which our neighbors or employees or subordinates unknowingly reveal in their actions: and of the terrible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed by children or even animals. Such discoveries can be the bitterest or sweetest experiences we have. But of course both the bitter and the sweet are limited by our doubt as to the wisdom of those who judge. We always hope that those who so clearly think us cowards or bullies are ignorant and malicious: we always fear that those who trust us or admire us are misled by partiality. I suppose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may break in upon us and any moment) will be like these little experiences, but magnified to the Nth.

For it will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall  have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realize that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along. We shall know and all creation will know too: our ancestors, our parents, our wives or husbands, our children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident truth about each will be known to all…

We can perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at each  moment will look whan the irresistible light streams in upon it’ that light which is so different from the light of this world- and yet, even now we know just enough of it to take it into account. Women sometimes have the problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by daylight. That is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not for the electric lights of the presents world but for the daylight of the next. The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light will last longer.