I’ve been thinking a lot about the new-ish age-ish interpretation of “abundance.” I see and hear "scarcity mentality" in every nook and person of my church while we work to raise our annual half-mil, and it repels me. But I'm not qualified or secure enough in my own "abundance" to get everyone all at once, POOF!, to adopt this major shift of mindset. Yes, changing minds is hard... but despite my desire to move forward, some segment of my brain rebels because anything so easy has got to be bullshit, right?
But a way to understand that "enough is a feast," and "I already have everything I need" popped up as clear and true when we had some work to do in the garden, and my 6-year-old got it right away.
I could have explained taking down an old tree my old way, by poor-mouthing: "We had to remove this tree. Yeah, kill it. It was like 50 years old. It had been dying for at least five years and no one wanted to take care of it because did you know it costs like more than a thousand dollars to take down a big tree like that? Hard decision. But the insurance claims would be a way lot more if it dropped on our neighbor's roof!" We can talk about costs, death, risks, and it's all negative, even as you watch the skilled man dangling a chainsaw 30 feet up, better than any circus act.
My daughter, though, loved the abundance as soon as she saw the result of his work: "Look! We got a new stump! We can have tea parties on it, jump off it, and plant things on it AND around it!" She even knew her fish would want to watch the man climbing the tree with his stirrups and harness. We moved the fishbowl onto the windowsill so he could see.
My girl apprehends a whole, beautiful world with a new toy around every corner or at the base of every lost garden asset.
And it clicked just a bit for me then. One click.
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1 comment:
I love this. Children have a way of making things very clear because they have not had the world beat it out of them yet...
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