Scarcity and Abundance
At twelve years old, I sat in my grade six class, with two neat braids woven from my head, listening to the teacher talk about our graduation. In my quaint town, you spend six years in elementary school, then you go to the “big” high school for grades seven through twelve. Graduating from grade six was a big deal, so teachers and families came together to make a celebration for us with a graduation ceremony, class trips, and the like.
The teacher was discussing the various awards that would be given out at the ceremony. I knew I was too ordinary and mediocre to receive any of the awards she was talking about. Then she mentioned one for volunteer work, and that seemed possible to me. I picked up a few volunteer activities, helped out at the local nursing home, and started projects to raise money for local charities. I got my hands dirty and got out of my comfort zone.
Soon, my classmates wanted to find ways to help out too. They asked me about opportunities for them and started coming up with their own ideas. As much as I wanted to be happy that my fellow classmates were doing good things in our community, a fear bubbled up inside me: What if I don’t get that plaque after all? What if someone else volunteers more than me?
This scarcity mindset followed me even into my adult years, especially in my writing. Writing is often a long, patient work of writing, waiting, editing, asking for outside edits, and revising again. A few years ago, I poured time, money, passion, and sweat into a book proposal. I took courses, hired editors, and spent nearly every writing hour on that book proposal. Yet it got rejected by multiple agents and publishers. I felt heartbroken over it. But what put more pressure on the wound was this: Seeing an author with a bigger platform write the exact same book I had fought for—and was published by one of the publishers that had rejected me.
This happened more than once, and every time it dug deeper into my wound. I felt like that little girl in grade six again.
I began writing from a place of scarcity—I had to write fast and get my words out there before someone else did. As I wrote, I peered over my shoulder to see if someone was sneaking up behind me, submitting article pitches or writing books that I wanted to write. Rather than enjoying the process, seeing the growth God was cultivating in my heart as I wrote, or working hard to write beautiful and truthful words, I threw anything I could together before it got taken from me.
In my scarcity mindset, I became much like the dwarf, Thorin Oakenshield, in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. After their long, treacherous journey, Thorin finally stood within his castle with gold enough to swim in, at long last reached by their treacherous journey. The dragon Smaug who had guarded the treasure laid in a heap in the lake from the deadly arrow of Bard. Yet when the Men from the lake and the Wood-Elves came seeking a portion for the part they played in assisting Thorin and his company of dwarves, he clung to every tiny piece of his treasure, unwilling to give them a dusting of silver. I likewise stood in my own castle of words, clutching each one in fear that someone else may take them for their own glory.
A few years later, God is softening my impatient, fearful heart. He is the God of abundance, who says he’s drawn my boundary lines in pleasant places.
In those boundary lines, God graciously spared me from writing immaturely. Though I was plenty passionate, the messages I wrote still needed time to be worked on in my heart by God. I still have those book proposals stored within folders inside of folders on my laptop. One quick glance at them reminds me of how much work those words still needed. Those messages weren’t ready for all to hear yet, and I don’t agree with some of the perspectives I once had. God not only spared me public humiliation but also spared my readers from my wrong beliefs.
Those boundary lines gave me time to remember that my writing is meant to glorify God, not myself. If I truly believe in these messages and think others need to hear them, that means cheering on others in the church when they bear that message instead of me. God is glorified whether I’m the carrier of the message or not. I need to relinquish my desire to see my name behind the book or article and praise God that it was written anyway. Like Thorin, I believed that my hard work and my loss meant that I deserved to keep it all to myself.
Also like Thorin, I needed to see that there’s a greater battle happening, and take my eyes off my treasures and raise up arms with my allies for beauty and truth. I need to bind together with my siblings in Christ to bring the gospel to the broken-hearted, heavy-laden, and the lost who are caught within the briars of sin. I can’t take the glory of my words with me when I die. Thorin learned this about his gold while on his deathbed—may I learn it sooner.
In each of these moments of seeming scarcity, God showed me abundance. He showed me abundances of grace and power, of wisdom and love, of fatherly discipline and tender mercy. God doesn’t deal with me scarcely, but in the gospel he has lavishly and abundantly given me himself, his love, and forgiveness. In him, I find true contentment to celebrate with my siblings in Christ when their name is read in recognition rather than mine. This is a daily lesson, and I need this prayer from Charles Spurgeon each morning:
Let them feel the completeness of the washing Christ has given, the blessed fullness of the righteousness which Christ has imputed, the eternal vitality of that life with which Christ has endowed us, the indissoluble character of that union by which we are knit to Christ by ties that never can be broken; and may we today rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh; and You write upon our hearts these blessed words, ‘Filled with all the fullness of God,’ and may we know it is so, that we have all that we can hold; and may we be praying to be enlarged, that we may take in even more of Christ than we have as yet received; for He is all ours, altogether ours, and ours world without end.¹
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“The Life Look”, p. 157 of https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/spurgeon/Spurgeons%20Prayers.pdf
