Count Your Blessings #20 – Having Enough

This blog is written primarily to myself – listen to yourself Graham.

I have enough material wealth – there is absolutely no question about that. I have more than enough personal wealth actually, yet my action and many of my thoughts struggle with that concept. I am, therefore, writing this blog to remind myself of that fact.

There is never any question as to whether or not the Chastney family can afford to eat each day; there is often a question as to whether we will eat too much.

There is never any question as to whether or not we will have somewhere warm and cozy to sleep at night. We have a beautiful house, which is dry and warm with beds that wrap us up and make us feel safe. Sometimes we choose to sleep in a tent; but that’s our choice.

There isn’t even a question, normally, whether we can afford to do something that we really want to do. We can normally afford it and normally we do it.

We can afford to go to the cinema, the theatre, on holiday, visit friends, go out for meals. We can afford to run two cars. We can afford electricity. We can afford fresh water. We can afford insurance for all of the things which we have. We can even afford to insure ourselves. I’m not worrying too much about my financial future in old age, because my pension provision is very good thank you. In short – I have enough, we have enough, we have more than enough.

Unfortunately “I have enough” is a logical statement that I can make but it’s not one that gets through to my inner thoughts or inner spirit. I have spent most of my life struggling to get to my current financial position, and now I have got here I am struggling to turn off the urge to earn more in order to get more. This is of course a curse. It’s a double edged curse. On one side of the curse there is the urge to get more money. In order to fulfill this urge I need to work ever longer and harder, a strive to get into good positions at work. On the other side is the urge to get more things which don’t satisfy, actually the more you have the less they satisfy. It’s a deep seated curse which only the few manage to escape from. I’m not sure I could ever fully escape but I am determined to get it into a much clearer perspective.

How am I planning to deal with the curse? Well there are already a couple of things that I am doing. One, of course, is to make it public that I have enough, and that’s the purpose of this particular muse. The other is to get intentional about giving more money away. Giving money away is a great way of realising that other people can get so much more value out of it than I can.

We have sponsored a child in Africa for a long time; a boy who is sponsored in Jonathan’s name. We have recently started sponsoring a girl too; who is sponsored in Emily’s name. For a terrifyingly small amount of money those two children get so much more value than we would. The way that Emily has connected with this concept has been amazing. Even though all we have is a picture of this girl, Emily has identified with her and her situation in a remarkable way. We also give away to other things – but that’s between us and God. My intention is to keep down that track, giving it away has to be a good way of keeping the curse under control.

I’m trying to decide what else I should do, there are a couple of ideas but they haven’t quite crystallised yet.

It is a real blessing to have enough. It’s a curse not to realise it.

The real question at the back of all of this is the question of priorities. Is it important that I have more things? Is it important that I have more money? Jesus had some things to say about this:

“Don’t hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or–worse!-stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.”

Matthew 6