Enough for everyone

If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity, a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly.

Walter Brueggemann, The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity

How would our decision making transform if we oriented towards a gift economy instead of a market economy?  Some people have more than enough. Some people have enough. Some people don’t have enough.   We live in a world where everyone should flourish.  Yet the inequity in the world continues to grow. I have heard so many people tell me throughout my life that this is human nature, it is how the world works. 

How would the world change if we lived out of a sense of abundance?  Would we purchase less? Would we share more?  How would it impact the price of our homes or cars or food? How would it reframe how people are paid? Would there still be “low wage” workers? Would there still be billionaires? Would SNAP disappear? Would we be open to paying more so people could earn a good living while also paying less on goods that we could understand as optional? 

These are the questions to consider as we walk along the good road.

Join us in October as we discuss Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. It will be a rich discussion about how we orient ourselves to the world, how we relate to one another and how we understand  the Good News.