Tagged: providence

Introspection on a childhood memory of making your own pencil

Back when I was in first or second grade, during a quiz, I learned that one of my classmates didn’t have a pencil. So I lent her mine and then went outside the classroom, surveying the corridors and school grounds for a discarded pencil lead to fit inside a lollipop stick that I found, feeling confident that I would find one. And I did.

Pleased with myself, I returned to my seat and finished the quiz, feeling the beginning of a “handyman” identity and discovering firsthand the perspective that if you look around well enough, probably the solution to most problems could just be lying around you. That there could be value in something that someone has discarded—and, perhaps more distantly, that you don’t have to stress your life becoming rich in order to find means and ways.

I somewhat get what Annie Dillard said:

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”


































			

			
						
					

		

		
	

	

	
	

		

		

			
							
			
							

					
						Sackcloth for those of little faith					
				

					


		

			

When I examine my anxiety, I discover that it is a compulsion for advance grief. Sometimes we convince ourselves it’s somewhat valuable, a sort of preparation, so that at least you’re not caught by surprise when the sadness comes. But more often it’s just an unnecessary overextension of our sorrows. Jesus’s words “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?” are still very true, not because Jesus was a fan of positive thinking, but because we can’t live in a constant state of advance worry. Literally. In fact, we know that doing so would instead take hours from our lives.





The world, Jesus says, runs after what to wear and what to eat (or what to add to one’s resume, portfolio, or list of things to fall back on), and until we seek the Father’s kingdom, we merely add to the mad rush. As the law of supply and demand would have it, the more people join the craze for “storing up things for themselves,” the harder it is to sustain such a life. There is enough for our need, as someone said, but not for our greed. The exclusivity and affluence may feel great and legitimate, perhaps especially when you lived most of your life in hardship, but after a certain point, the exclusivity turns into isolation, the affluence into weariness. The sense of security may stay for a time, but sooner or later something always manages to pull the rug from under your feet.





Clothes, food, security for our children–“your Father knows that you need them.” I’m so glad that’s in the Bible, because the call is not really for asceticism or communism. The call is against hoarding. The call is to store up things that make us “rich toward God.”





Is there a reasonable way to store up things for yourself and yet still be rich toward God? Maybe. But for sure we are not called to live the trouble of expending ourselves to find that loophole.





“Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?
“Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.”–Luke 12:22-31