“How are we going to do this?” I asked Autumn. We only had sixty dollars to cover a week of meals for the ten girls we lived with. In silence, we simultaneously stared into our shopping cart that was already littered with bright produce, breads, and sauces.
“Okay.” I grasped the handles of the cart more firmly as we stood in the check-out line. “Let’s just set aside the essentials. If we purchase everything we absolutely need first, we can see if we have enough for the rest.”
We dug through the items, setting aside the milk, eggs, and wheat tortillas as musts. Saving the paper towels and bell peppers back because we could live without them. As the woman at the cash register rang up the groceries, I kept my eye on the green number on the screen that continued increasing in value. Fifty-six came and Autumn and I contemplated what our last item would be.
We were pulling out the bagels when a voice chimed up from behind us. “Excuse me girls.”
Turning to the woman in line after us, I watched in surprise as she reached for her wallet. “I can cover the rest,” she was saying. Baffled, I stuttered some incoherent response.
Limited resources is not a foreign experience to anyone living on this earth. Usually, I associate poverty with things like money, food, housing, or other physical supplies. But what if we defined it simply as a lack of abundance?
While many on the earth face material poverty, many others battle with relational and spiritual poverty, which can lead to mental or emotional struggles like isolation and depression. Lacking deep relational or spiritual connections leave us feeling empty.
To take the concept one level further, what if abundance and poverty could also be mindsets? What if we had an inward attitude of poverty? That could like doubt or fear. While a mindset of abundance, on the other hand, is generous with faith.
I’m constantly noticing this bent toward a poverty perspective in my day-to-day life—when I’m living in doubt and walking fear. Since I'm used to being surrounded by limited resources in this broken world, there's an underlying disbelief in the abundance of God’s power.
When I’m tempted to face situations in life with an attitude of doubt, I’m learning to remind myself that my God is not limited like I am. He is a God of abundance. He is the source of every good thing (James 1:17).
Whether this changes the way we pray for physical provisions or sparks an inward attitude of faith and hope when we're tempted to have a scarcity mindset, let us seek to remember how capable God is. We can trust him, because he is a God of abundance.
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