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This is an excerpt from a soon to be published book that I wrote called “The Frantic Mother’s Handbook”.  After my Peaceful Woman’s Retreat on Maui I re-read it and I wanted to share it with you all. (By the way that is southern for at least one person. My hope is that I am really sharing it with all you all.) By the way in the book I begin each of my ponderings with a question and end it with a prayer.  Prayers are wonderful things if praying is your thing.  If not, you can simply skip the prayer part and stick to pondering.

What if scarcity is essential for the creation of abundance?

If we are to stop the hectic pace we all experience from time to time in our lives, we are going to have to make choices. Making choice means that some things we now see as essential may have to be eliminated.  So before we even begin the process let me share an image that has altered my way of seeing things.

I love flowers.  I do not love their care and feeding about which I know nothing, but I do love seeing them in bloom brightening my living space.  In honor of this love, I had a 36’ planter built when I renovated my house.  A friend who loved flowers volunteered to plant the planter.  All I had to do was go to Home Depot, my home away from home, and buy the plants.  I bought what I thought was enough, but they only filled about 1/3 of the planter.  I was sent back to the store again and again.  Eventually the planter was stuffed full of brightly flowering plants.  They never got much bigger than they were when they were first purchased, but there were so many that I really didn’t notice.  Eventually the flowers, and the plants to which they were attached, withered and died.  I do not know if this was the natural order of things, or simply what naturally happens to plants unlucky enough to have me for a caretaker.

I decided to replant the planter myself.  This time, since I was doing the work, I put in about ¼ of the previous number.  Initially the planter looked sparse and not particularly pretty.  But within a couple of weeks the plants grew large and full and the planter was filled to overflowing.

What if our lives are like that?  We plant them so full of things that nothing can really flourish.  But when we think about cutting back, it feels as if our lives will become shabby and sparse.  What if God’s promise of abundance is just that—a real promise that He is more than willing to keep?  But what if abundance cannot appear in overstocked planters or in overstocked lives?  Is scarcity essential for creating abundance?  It is something to think about.

Lord, please give me the courage to allow abundance to enter my life by showing me ways to create the space in which it needs to flourish.

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