Abundant Destruction
There's something almost spellbinding about the sugar bowl when you are just about as high as a doorknob- all your waking moments, laser-focused on battle strategy for locating the sugar bowl, avoiding detection and in victory, devouring the spoils of stealth, your fistful of sweet crystals.
I was deep undercover on one such sweet mission, but the vigilance of mother with eyes behind her back caught me red-handed in the sugar bowl. You know for sure, this was not the first time, and I had gotten a hiding from it several times. But you also know the allure of the sugar bowl. At this age, any surface it is placed on is just at eye level, and no matter how hard you try, it calls to you.
She had had it with me, and I waited for my character re-alignment lesson, usually applied to the rear as she disappeared into the kitchen. My entire life flashed before my eyes, death was near. My heart leapt to my throat at the sound of her returning footsteps. Instead of the chosen rod of discipline, I see, through the flood of tears already filling my nose with snort, the jar of sugar from whence the sugar bowl draws its sustenance. She orders me to sit up and shoves the jar in front of me at the table.
"Is it sugar you want? Here you go. Eat!"
I'm confused, and I just stare at the jar, then back at her, aware that this may be sarcasm and if I dare touch the jar, I am more dead than I already am.
"I said, eat it! Eat as much as you want."
She senses my hesitation and slowly reaches for the nearest tool of mass instruction, the slipper off her foot, now in hand. I'm waiting for it to land. I flinch as she gestures towards the sugar with it and says, "Eat it." I open the jar slowly, watching closely if she changes her countenance to suggest otherwise. I put the lid on the table, wipe the snort and tear soup off my face with the back of my hand and look up at her. "Will we be here all day? I said, eat it!"
I wipe my hand on my shirt and quickly dip it inside, shaking, and dab a finger in the sugar and then back to lick it. I then go back and do a pat and soon a small fist grab I bring it out and slowly take it to my mouth. All this while I am looking up to make sure that the slipper in hand was not headed in the same direction as my little fist. All she said when our eyes met was, "Eat it all."
You and I both know that I quickly moved from ‘Yay, this is Christmas come early!’ to ‘I can't eat anymore, or I'm going to be sick.’ after about three fistfuls. A very sore rear later, the lesson was learnt once and for all. I wanted nothing to do with that sugar bowl and all its relatives! How can it move from being the sweetest thing ever to I want no more of it when I had the freedom to have it all? I might even have vowed then never to take sugar in anything ever again.
The Israelites found themselves eating quail until they could not stomach it anymore. God said they'd eat it '...until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it.' [Numbers 11:18-20 - NLT] all this because they were bored with manna and grumbled in discontent about God's choice of provision to them in the wilderness.
We live in great discontent driven by an insatiable desire for more. Our entire lives are lived striving for more. Don't get me wrong, ambition is great; not settling for mediocrity, commendable even, but there is a very big difference between extending self beyond your comfort zone to fully explore your God-given potential and discontent. Every day we are bombarded by details of people's lives with bank accounts with too many zeros to count, innumerable cars, houses, titles, you name it.
It is not enough to have one or two, whichever is enough; it must just be more than what is reasonable for one individual to possess. We pay homage to plenty and gawk at the abundance displayed on bright screens [used to be glossy magazine pages in the stone age]. Then we go back to face depression from our comparatively dull, mundane, and mediocre realities. We've had it; it's coming out of our nostrils, and we loathe it!
But do we really need that much?
More often than not, form informs function. Human beings are created with some solid form constraints that fly in the face of this obsession with abundance. You can afford to be anywhere in the world but aren't omnipresent. How many cars can you really drive at a time? Do you really have that many legs to wear all the pants in your closet? Even if you can buy the finest food in the world, you can only eat a reasonably small portion in one sitting. Heck, we do not even have a lifespan as long as it'll take to use up all the things we desperately accumulate in this lifetime.
There is nothing noble either about the other extreme, abject poverty, especially since it is a result of the imbalance created by all the hoarding and grabbing we do to have more of what we very likely don't need.
Beyond getting to the sickeningly sweet part of abundance, there is the pride that swells with self-sufficiency. Of what use is anyone or anything to you anymore if they have nothing to offer you? Of what use is God if you have all that you need, want, and then some?
When the Israelites got to the promised land, God reminded them of their days in the wilderness, when they lacked and had learnt to depend on His bounty. He had provided manna daily, enough for each day, for them. They roamed the desert for 40 years without tilling lands and sowing but always had food to eat, water to drink and feet shod for the journey. He was now bringing them to a land of abundant blessing where '...food is plentiful and nothing is lacking...' [Deuteronomy 8:7-10- NLT].
God says to them that 'He [God], did all this [the suffering in the desert] so you would never say to yourself, 'I have achieved this wealth with my own strength and energy' [Deuteronomy 8:17]. God knows that once prosperity and abundance checks in, we begin to think that our acumen, intellect, strength, prowess, networks, charisma are responsible for our success. We believe we are all we need to survive and thrive. We even go further to lord it over others whom we feel we have control over because of our wealth. God ends his warning and reminder to Israel thus; 'But I assure you of this: if you ever forget the LORD your God... you will certainly be destroyed. [Deuteronomy 8:19 - NLT, emphasis mine]
I see plenty of God missing in the world today; we're erasing the 'inconvenience of God' from our modern lives. Most assuredly, destruction is slowly visiting us all around. I cannot help but think that abundance is certainly wreaking havoc; that sickeningly sweet choke and gag of when too much of a good thing becomes repulsive.
Look around you. What are some things that you could truly do without? Think about the things that keep you awake at night, or keep you on your toes. Is any of that rooted in some discontent disguised as ambition or drive? Reflect on these two scriptures as you go through your day today.
Proverbs 30:7-9 Reads in part ‘...give me neither poverty nor riches! Give me just enough to satisfy my needs.’
1 Tim 6:6-11 Reads in part ‘...But people who long to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction...’
