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“I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.” - II Corinthians 8:13-14

When I was in college I spent a summer interning at a church in Indianapolis, Indiana. I worked with their youth program getting to know the gifts and talents of the neighborhood. The church practiced Assets Based Community Development, where focus is placed on what a community does have, instead of what it doesn’t. It’s the practice of seeing abundance in every neighborhood, you just have to let yourself look for it.

 On one of my first days, a community leader said to me, “you need to learn to look past poverty. If you spend all of your energy focusing on how old and worn out someone’s couch is, you won’t even notice their kid’s artwork displayed on the walls.” This sentiment has stayed with me ever since: am I looking for scarcity or am I looking for abundance?

In II Corinthians, Paul discusses how we can care for one another through abundance. He is asking the people of Corinth to give generously, and he is encouraging them to do so from a mindset of abundance. Yet, he doesn’t want them to feel pressure, reminding them that others have abundance to provide for the needs of the people of Corinth. What does it look like to view life in terms of abundance?

Perhaps our garden has provided an abundance of produce we can share with those around us.  Or maybe we are also recipients of abundance, seeing our own needs not as scarcity, but rather as a space for abundance to flow in. Grateful for the abundance of friendship when someone shares their time to listen to your story. Viewing life through the lens of abundance means recognizing our own gifts and talents and asking ourselves ‘what can I share with those around me?’, AND it means recognizing that there are others in our community whose gifts and talents will be shared with us. 

The beautiful thing about abundance is it’s already here. It’s just that sometimes we get so distracted by what seems to be lacking, or isn’t there (the worn out couch), that we miss what is right in front of us (the artwork on the walls). Abundance is ordinary, it exists every day in all different communities, but when we recognize it, and when we start to share it with one another, it is anything but ordinary.