“Never ____________ enough.” How might you fill in that blank? Think about it.
Brene’ Brown, in her book, Daring Greatly, addresses what she calls “our culture of scarcity.” “Never good enough,” “Never thin enough,” “Never smart enough,” are just a few examples that Brown lists from her research with hundreds of interviewees. Then she quotes Lynne Twist, from her book, The Soul of Money:
“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ The next one is ‘I don’t have enough time.’ Whether true of not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours of our days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of … Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack … This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life …”
In the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 6 (also recorded in Mt 9, Lk 9 and Jn 6), the disciples of Jesus urge the Master to “send the people away … so they can buy themselves something to eat.” Jesus challenges their “culture of scarcity” as He directs the disciples, “You give them something to eat.”
You probably know the rest of the report from the Galilean countryside … more than 5,000 were fed with two fish and five loaves of bread, and “all were SATISFIED.” Everyone had ENOUGH. He, in whom “the fullness of God is pleased to dwell” (Col.1:15-20), has chosen to come among us and pour Himself out for us on the cross (Phil. 2:5-11) so that we, His church, might be the “fullness of Him” in the world (Eph. 1:22-23).
Jesus is still challenging our “culture of scarcity.” May the Holy Spirit always keep our eyes seeking the Provider, not the provision; trusting in the Savior, not supply streams; resting in His completeness, not scrambling in our inadequacies. And when we are called upon to “give them something to eat,” we will simply give whatever we have to Jesus as we give it to others, and trust Jesus to always be enough.
