Just a Little Bit More

I lean hard on the kitchen counter and I try to piece together my grocery list and do simple arithmetic to insure that the dollars in my pocket are enough. I go to the store and put things in the cart and pull things out and make a second list to go to the farmer's market and the discount store and I break a sweat and my stomach lurches with every beep of the scanner.

And I wonder...

I wonder...

Does anyone else feel this panic? 
Am I the only one trying to remember exactly how much is left in the account? 
Can I make these dollars and cents make more sense each month? 
Will there ever be more than enough? Enough to untie the knots in my gut?

The cashier tells the balance and there is just enough to cover the bill.

I've heard it said that when John D. Rockefeller was asked, "How much is enough?" he replied, "Just a little bit more."

Our culture piles and hoards and yet there never seems to be enough.

We fill paper sacks with the dusty cans from the back corners of our pantries and we cart them to soup kitchens to fill what is empty, but we find more often then not that we are the empty.

Hands full, but soul empty.

We hand over bags filled with fashion gone out of fad and we have no idea where it goes or what good it does or doesn't really do. 

A little more in the bank account, the closet, the stuff stuffed into the cracks of a cracked life, won't cover up our soul's need to be made whole. 

It is easy to wish away, pray away, hope away the want and the gap and our desperate need. We persist in thinking that "Just a little bit more" and we'll be free, but what if freedom isn't what God wants for us.

What if the scraping to get by is the very thing that keeps us on our knees?
What if all the things withheld are the very graces that we hold? 
What if the knots in our stomachs are an invitation to find our ends met in God when the ends don't seem to meet? 

Freedom from want and need is in finding, that in Christ, we have neither want nor need. 

Believe with every fiber that even when you dig for change in your purse, and the cushions and your kid's piggy bank and you only ever have just enough; God is for you.

He is the more when we barely have enough.