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Jesus tells us that he ‘came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ (John 10). Sadly, we live in a world in which those words and that emotion has lost, to be biblical again, it’s saltiness. A theology of abundance, so ably demonstrated through scripture and, indeed, through so much of the wonder and beauty of creation which surrounds us, has been twisted and turned by acquisitiveness and kind of societal narcissism into a somewhat desperate and deeply entrenched theology of scarcity. That sense of scarcity cuts across so much of our lives – there is not (perhaps there is never…) enough; we cannot afford to fix the wrongs, to right the injustices; we are not going to make it; we may just have enough.
But you and I are called on to provide a different voice for God’s world – there is always enough – indeed, more than enough. More goodness, more compassion, more forgiveness, more acceptance and understanding, and, yes, much more than enough resources to do what we need and want to do, It is a mind set as much as it is a metric. We have been given all of this abundance – creativity, skill, the created order, life itself. We did not deserve it, we did not earn it. We were given it.
And so, we care called to share it, to give it away, to life live abundantly and to bring others into that abundance with us. By any way of measuring, we have more knowledge, more understanding, more ability to address and solve issues than we have ever had before, and we are gaining more of those things every day. By any measure, we have more wealth than any generation before ours!
So, together, we can share resources that will make the renovations to the Guesthouse the exciting reality that we know it is for us all and for the community. Equally important, perhaps even more important, we can live abundant lives – lives that bring possibilities into action, lives that proclaim abundance over scarcity; lives that change the world – our abundantly blessed and resourced world – into a life that Jesus foretold and modelled!
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