Moving from lack to abundance without the waste

07 Apr 2010 1 Comment

by onecrazykat in God, Growing & Learning, Thoughts Tags: abundance, children, Family, gifts, god, healing, lack, law of attraction, money tree, scarcity thinking, waste not want not

A precious gift goes in the trash

My daughter Nico is excited about learning how to sew. She got a sewing basket for Christmas full of crochet and yarn needles, sewing scissors, and plenty of yarn. She has been crocheting for several months now and her single crochet stitch is absolutely beautiful. But she’s ready to move on to new things. She’s been wanting to make a pillow, but still hasn’t used regular thread and needle yet and has never watched me (or anyone else) use stuffing (she calls it fluff).

So I bought a bag of fluff and some regular sewing needs and thought we’d make some things together. I explained to her that I would show her how to use them since she had never done this before. But she couldn’t wait. I woke up one morning and found her upstairs using her yarn needle and yarn to stitch up some fabric and the fluff spread all over the floor. The cat and the little ones had been rolling around in it and the bag was totally destroyed so it could not be reused.

I scraped up the fluff from the carpet and threw it all in the trash. She was upset at her hard work getting tossed and I was angry at the waste.

How we first learn about lack

Once I had calmed down, I reevaluated the situation. I was trying to teach my daughter about wasting our precious resources. But then I realized that I would be encouraging lack mentality and scarcity thinking. This was how I realized that I had learned about lack. There is never enough. I can’t get enough. I don’t have enough. It was how I grew up (and probably you too). I remember hearing my mom fussing at me about wasting water… wasting electricity… wasting food… money doesn’t grow on trees. My husband even tells a (now) humorous story about him, his brother, and his dad coming home from a boyscout raffle with a small bag of potatoes and a bag of marshmallows – they had spent $5 for it. His mom, in a fit of rage, stomps on the marshmallow bag squashing them flat. And then he goes on to say how they had flat marshmallows in their hot cocoa for weeks because she had refused to throw it away. We all have stories like this. Maybe not as thrilling! But we all learned about lack and scarcity by living it.

I did not want this for her. I wanted her to understand that life is abundant and full. But I also didn’t want to have to throw away broken or destroyed things because they had been misused. What to do. It seemed like an insurmountable paradox. How can our supply be infinite but at the same time lost and wasted?

Abundance is a GIFT that we can honor or reject

Then it hit me… abundance is a gift. All that we have is a gift. Life is a gift from God. Fresh air, sunshine and rain. Fresh produce, love, family, and opportunity. God give us abundantly. You can also look at is as a human exchange. I work to earn money, and I use that money to buy or pay for things. That takes my time and energy. When I work to pay for the water bill, and the water is poured down the drain unused, it is like taking my time and energy and throwing it away and so rejecting my gift (of time and energy).

So I asked Nico, “If you gave me a chocolate bunny (can you tell we just celebrated Easter?) what would you expect me to do?” Eat it, share it and enjoy it. “What if I took that bunny and threw it out the window, then drove over it with the car? How would that make you feel?” Very bad. “Would you want to give me another chocolate bunny?” No way, you’d just run over it with the car again!

Waste not, want not

So, its not that there isn’t enough chocolate bunnies in the world (or fluff, or money, or food, or love, or opportunity). It is that we so readily reject these gifts. Then the gifts start coming to us less and less and sometimes even stopping all together. When we are ready to honor our gifts and use them with love and respect, then we will start receiving the abundant gifts that God has for us.