Back to the Garden
What are the things you worry about?
He 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 clothing. - Luke 12:22-23
What Jesus is telling us in today's Gospel is that we should not worry about such things as food and clothing. God who provides for all creation, will provide for us as well.
So, how does that work?
I have gotten to know folks here who have no home and possess only what they can carry in their backpacks for in shopping carts.
Some come to us each day for food. And occasionally when we have donated clothing, they change in the bathroom and toss what they wore before.
Is this how God provides for them, through us?
The birds and the flowers may be able to make do with the beautiful covering God gave them, and they can gain nourishment from the soil of find food in nature, but what about us?
We seem to be more needy than the rest of creation. While the birds can travel here and there, staying where it is warm, building their nests from what they find lying around, we abhor that type of existence.
We want stability, security, assurances.
So we tend to pity those who survive from day to day with little, making due with what they can forage and find.
The gap between having nothing and being secure in one's own home is huge. Even if one was to give a person a place to live, the problem will not be solved. We have designed a life that is expensive to sustain, and to earn what it takes to live requires even more money in education.
When I think of the story of Genesis, I see the problem we have created for ourselves.
We had everything we needed to enjoy this life and we chose to take control of our own destiny instead. Unfortunately, we cannot go back to the Garden and start over, so we must find a way to live with the constraints and difficulties we have created for ourselves.
If we have faith in God and seek His help in providing for ourselves, we may find ourselves disappointed, but if through that faith we seek to help each other, then we may find we can make a reasonable facsimile of the Garden right here, right now, living in harmony, sharing what we have with each other.
And when we do that, we will discover that we don't need as much as we thought. But we do need each other.
More to come...