Today's
Meditation:
There
are many who preach and write about abundance, and how
it's our natural right to live lives full of abundance and
material goods and plenty of money. While I do
believe that all of our needs will be met while we're
here--as long as we give life a chance to meet our
needs--I'm not quite sure that everyone is meant to have
the kind of abundance that others have. In making a
choice to be a teacher, for example, I've effectively made
it impossible to earn the kinds of money that a business
executive would make, for example.
Abundance
certainly isn't about money, but money is a large part of
it. A person without money also will be without the
lakeside vacation home, or even the long vacations abroad
or the many nice meals in nice restaurants or the
beautiful furniture and paintings for the living room.
But
that's okay, for the world is demanding something of
me--it's demanding that I use my God-given skills in
certain areas, and it's telling me that me using my skills
in that way is much more important than me gaining
material or financial wealth. And every day,
millions of teachers go to their schools and give all that
they can, in most cases bringing home paychecks that don't
come close to equaling the talent they possess or the
effort that they're expending.
There's
nothing wrong with going without, though. When we
do, we learn different things about ourselves and our
environments and how we fit into them. My wife and I
lived for a year in a motor home--less than 300 square
feet for the two of us. And it wasn't bad at
all. We didn't have any of the luxuries of life, but
once we grew accustomed to it, we didn't notice at all
what we were missing; we just focused on what we had and
made the very best of it.
We
can ask a lot of the world, and it's good when we
do. It's just a good idea not to be too disappointed
when all that we ask for doesn't show up, for if it did we
probably wouldn't be learning the things that we need to
learn.
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