it’s not enough…

When we think of scarcity or poverty, we usually think in terms of money. And that’s valid. A lot of people throughout the world are in poverty economically. It’s systemic and can be especially cruel in places where there are huge differences of power. But, that’s not the kind of poverty that I want to talk about.

This kind is much more subtle. It sneaks into the back of our minds in the form of plenty or in the form of good enough for now. Many people know this voice or have met someone who lives with this voice in their head. It’s the voice that says, stay in the job that’s killing you. Don’t take the scary leap by quitting to pursue your dream. You don’t know what’s out there. Stay with the demon you know, not the one you don’t. Go out and keep buying the next new thing, the next new car, the next new house, the next new whatever because they’re never good enough for you. Or, you know, stay in that small apartment—stay in that place that makes sense financially but you hate living there because you know it’s killing you mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The scarcity of the self is an inherent thought that you aren’t good enough. Not only that but that God can’t provide for you if you were to leave your situation. It’s the idea that you have to have control of absolutely everything. And to be honest, we can’t control much. So, when we try to control our worlds we end up in a scarcity mindset, a mindset that we can’t take vacations because we can’t afford it, we can’t ever get out of debt, we can’t find friends or grow our community, we won’t find love, or have kids. We get stuck in these loops only seeing the smallness and how little there actually is in our lives because we’re controlling them.

If we take ourselves out of it, if we take a step back and say I’m not in control. I actually have way more than what I thought I did. Then we can start to enter into a mindset of giving and overflow.

A lot of this poverty mindset does start with one very specific thought: I am not enough. I am not enough for myself, for my friends, for my family, for my work, for my dreams, for my…you fill in the blank. Everything else comes out of that one thought. We try so hard to control our worlds to tell ourselves that we are enough because we have a steady job. We are enough because we can pay our bills. We are enough because we got married before 30. We are enough because we have our own house. Whatever fulfills your enough, it’s still not doing it. Is it?

If it is, then I take it back. But I have a guess that there are still nights that you lie in bed worrying if people perceived you wrong. If you made the wrong choice or if there is a choice you should make.

We were not made for poverty. We were not made to be poor. Now, don’t hear me wrong. God did say that we will have hardships. There’s a few passages that talk about selling everything you own in order to follow Him and that the rich man cannot enter the Kingdom. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about spiritual poverty. I don’t believe God created or wants us to be spiritually poor. We shouldn’t be beating ourselves up everyday or thinking “woe is me.” We shouldn’t hate ourselves. At its very simplest, God is love and God made us. Which means we are made out of and for love. How can we show love if we hate ourselves? Love cannot exist in a poverty mindset. Hate and apathy does but not love.

It grieves me to think that out of all the sermons I heard, out of all the Christians I met in my life, only a handful of them were about spiritual wealth. Telling people that they are enough. That God didn’t make them lacking in anything. He made them whole so there’s no need to try to be more than you already are.

And I get it. I really do. The world is not built this way. The world does everything it can to push you down. To tell you that you suck and that the only way you can get better is to buy things or find a numbing method. Emotions exist and people are messy. Christians mess up. People don’t apologize. And in all of this, we have to figure out how to live with ourselves, our traumas, our emotions, other people, other people’s traumas and emotions, the government, the housing market, racism…and the list goes on.

It gets tiring. So, start here. Start with yourself and know this. You don’t have to live in poverty anymore. You are enough. You are not lacking a single thing. You are whole and you are worthy.