An Observation (vii.i)

Right in the middle, if you look REALLY carefully, you can see the ocean.

One thing about writing these things down and then telling people on Facebook that I'd like them to read it is that I end up a bit paralyzed with angst over being misunderstood.  And by misunderstood, I mostly mean, people not agreeing with  me. Because as my husband will attest, I am most often right, so if another does not agree with me, clearly, they have just misunderstood what I was trying to say because it goes without saying that if they did understand me, they'd agree.

And here's one thing I'm right about:  You're Rich Too.

My daughter thinks we're rich, but not really in the way I hope she thinks we are when she's a bit older.  For her it was a pretty simple leap: if rich people have more than they need, and she hasn't experienced any deep want, we must be rich. There isn't anything much attached to that yet - it's just a statement of five-year-old fact.

But soon, like all of us, she will start noticing what she doesn't have.  She'll see what her classmates bring to school; she'll start watching television when I'm not there to make sure it's of the ad-free variety (thank you lord for video-on-demand); she'll start spending time online and reading and being in places with her brain where I can not be and where the culture we live is constantly murmuring "you deserve this too..." 

And when that happens, she'll be tempted into some old-fashioned scarcity thinking.  And that will be a drag. I wish I knew what to do about that.

For now, I'm just working on my own No Way Jose to the culture.  I am practicing remembering I have more than enough.   When I forget, I do things like check the Global Rich List (I am the one percent!) or walk 3 blocks west and look at the ocean.  That I can see from the grocery story. 

If you are someone I know, it is most likely that you are rich too.  It is most likely that you don't feel like it most days, but alas, the reason the world needs therapy is that massive gap between how we feel and what is true.

We have to remember this part so that we remember our job: our job to share out of our abundance. 

As we move into Advent and Christmas, I am going to try to carry this abundance-heart with me so that I can give a bit more freely.

I think this is what it means to be occupied.  I think living in abundance and rejecting the whispering voice that says "you deserve this too...", I think THAT is where freedom is at.