One of the nightmares that besets our culture is the message of scarcity. There’s an all-too-long list of what we might be missing and how our dreams could be realized if we only had more. Even the church can fall victim to such bad dreams. We don’t have enough resources to maintain our building. We don’t have enough money to pay a pastor. We don’t have enough members to sustain our congregation. We don’t have enough children in Sunday school or singers for the choir.
It can be easy to cry and hard to pull a ourselves out of our panic. Now we need to turn things around and face in a different direction, thinking in terms of abundance rather than scarcity. Granted, that’s easier said than done, but people of faith have the resources to recognize that God gives us more than enough of what we truly need. Once you start looking, gifts of abundance are visible–often in unexpected people and places.
This message is excerpted from “Turn it around” by Karen G. Bockelman in the January/February issue of Gather magazine. Today we remember Benedict the African, confessor, who died in 1589.
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