The Gift of Abundance

While exploring the words of James last week to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, I mentioned my own personal theory that the extent to which we live this out often depends on whether we ourselves operate out of a sense of  abundance or lack. 

For many year of my life, I operated out of lack.  Having been raised in a home with the instability of an alcoholic father and then adding to it out of my own insecure and destructive choices, the world became for me a place of uncertainty and even danger.  Other people were competition and self-protection my primary goal.   And God? Well ... He was pretty much non-existent.  At least for someone like me.

That was until I met a man who would turn my thinking around.  So exhausted was I by my lack mindset that I was willing to risk stepping into the church in which he pastored in hopes of finding a new way of thinking and living.  And it was a real risk too. I was fearful of being judged for my past choices, or my father's current one which I suspected was evident to others when he joined me for church on occasion.

But Pastor Donn Engebretson met my desperation and fear by speaking words of abundance over me. He told me how I was more than my past and more than my father's addiction. He shared stories from Scripture to affirm that truth and prayed over me to receive and trust in it.  And for the first time, a new sense of personal worth and dignity began to be formed in me; a worth and dignity grounded in Christ Jesus.

Pastor Donn would also take steps to do the same in my father's life though I would discourage it at first.  My anger towards my father kept me from considering he too was worthy of such a gift or even desiring of it.  But God reminded me of the transforming affect Pastor Donn's abundance had on me personally and I knew I needed to respond in kind to my Father.  

That decision would lead to a family "Intervention", which required our entire family to invest an entire summer preparing for because as we are learning in James, responding out of abundance towards another does not come naturally to us.  Even less so when provoked by years of addiction.  But the choice to pursue it was a good one and my father did seek treatment for his alcoholism as a result.

Most profound for me, however, was his motivation for doing so.  On numerous occasions he said the motivation to pursue healing came largely from the overwhelming abundance shown him through words of love, forgiveness and hope.  It ignited a hope that God might still do something for good in His life and in the life of our family - a hope that I have had the joy of seeing him live into everyday since.

A Challenge to Ponder:

If  you have come to know the grace of God in Christ Jesus, then you too we have experienced His abundance.  Consider for a moment who God might be placing in your life that is operating out of lack instead.  Ask God if He might be calling you to bless them by sharing your abundance with them in such a way as to set them free with the help of the Holy Spirit.  

- Pastor Dawn Bodi