AS SOMEONE WHO has lived with chronic pain and come to terms with being a body with limits, I struggle to square a theology of limits with a theology of abundance.
I have limits on my time, energy, and what my body can do. I’ve made peace with and even come to appreciate God’s elegant design of bounded human bodies and an Earth with limited, depletable resources. And yet, our faith speaks of a God who can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20, NIV), the same God who led the Israelites into a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) and pours oil over the psalmist’s head until his cup overflows (Psalm 23:5).
In a world rapidly running out of arable land, fossil fuels, and healthy soil and water, how do we rightly interpret a theology of abundance?
Under a malformed capitalist mindset, we’ve confused God’s abundance with an illusion of prosperity as unlimited resources and growth. Advertising tells us that we’ll be happy when we have more stuff, so we mistake abundance to mean material wealth. This logic gets truly obscene among the piles of buffet food, closets of barely worn fast fashion, McMansions, and other ways our sick society defines plenty.
At the same time, those who advocate for endless economic growth work to cultivate fear and hoarding through messages like, “Only 2 left in stock. Get yours now!” They distort a vision of bounded, earthly abundance into unearthly, limitless consumption.
That’s why the abundance mindset is often contrasted with the scarcity mindset. Abundance is about enough. Think: God giving the Israelites enough manna for each day. Misunderstood, abundance morphs into bloated opulence, spiritual stagnation, and rot. Think: The Israelites who hoarded manna because they didn’t trust that God would give more the following day. They lived with a scarcity mindset and got maggots the next day.
“A scarcity mindset has an underlying fear that there isn’t enough,” writes Looby Macnamara in People and Permaculture. “An abundance attitude trusts that our needs will be provided for.”
Trust entails relationship. At an Argentinian permaculture project that my family recently visited, I learned that most resilient ecosystems aren’t the ones with the greatest number of individual species, but the ones with the greatest number of relationships among species. Abundance, then, is less about how much we have and more about how much we share. Abundance consists not in a wealth of stuff, but in a wealth of relationships, solidarity, exchange, and trust.
I may have limits, and I choose to live within the bounds of my fair share. When someone else needs something, I choose to give freely, because I trust that when my time of need comes, my community will share with me.
Our shared resources will be severely strained in the coming decades as the climate crisis deepens. But if we operate with a right understanding of abundance, we will all have enough.
Liuan Huska is a freelance journalist and the author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness.
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