The Blessings of Enough

         Across the street from our home, beneath the winter-bare sprawl of a maple tree, there stands a holly tree. It is no taller than fifteen feet, but its branches are lush, thick with prickly, dark green leaves. One winter afternoon a couple of years ago, the branches sagged under the weight not only of thousands of bright red holly berries, but of a day-long snowfall.

         A flock of robins discovered the holly tree decked with its abundance. Because robins usually eat at least half their own weight per day, these birds did not gather around the feast like debutantes in an aristocrat's tea room. They descended on it with all the ravenous delirium of reporters around some disgraced celebrity.

         The little holly tree trembled and swayed as hundreds of panicked wings beat furiously against leaf, and branch, and competing feather. In twenty minutes, not a single red berry remained. And the holly was just another sticker bush.

         Most human economic and political systems are based on the concept of scarcity – the notion that there are too few resources to meet human needs. When establishing institutions on the principle of scarcity, we necessarily create highly competitive cultures in which the available resources become the property and privilege of a very few.

         The church has jumped on that angst-driven train. Even we who claim to follow Jesus help to strip our environment down to the nub, squawking and fluttering like flocks of famished robins, ravaging what appears to be the scarce remnants of a winter-bound landscape. So, we are pleased with God, and right with God only when we get not just enough, but excess. For some reason, we have decided that we need more than our share in order to avoid feeling the cold creep of scarcity in our lives. And in such an economy, even God’s grace is a scarce commodity to be bought and sold.

         It seems to have been the same in Jesus’ day. “Therefore I tell you,” he says, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Mt. 6:25-27)

         It’s a leap of faith to trust these words, and I would never suggest that it’s a quick and easy leap. I will say, though, when we make the leap, when we learn to trust the mysterious truth of God’s economy of grace. And there, the world becomes a place of startling abundance, a place where – like the table set before us – we gratefully celebrate the blessings of enough.