Rich

About a year or more ago I was at Panera Bread with my boss and a co-worker.  I was struck with a very real dilemma: Asiago Cheese or Everything bagel?  My stomach did not know.

I decided on the Everything simply due to the fact that it was cheaper.  When I relayed this quandary and my solution (with much enthusiasm) to my boss, she said something to the effect of, "Don't live with a spirit of poverty."

I was half offended, half amused, but the gist of her words stuck with me.

When I thought about those words later, I laughed to myself: her husband is one of Dave Ramsey's biggest fans.  After all, I was just being wise with my money & resources.  I don't think I really understood the heart of the message.

Flash forward to about a week and a half ago:
I was looking up local photographers for a maternity & baby pics.  I was thinking about how much I love having memories captured with photography.  I started thinking how much I would love to have someone there to photograph the labor and just after birth, and how I'd love to have an outdoor family session and a studio maternity session.  I was thinking how great it would be to be able to own all of the images to archive.  I started to remember how picky I am about photography.  I started to feel really poor, and really sad for myself: there is no way we could afford everything I wanted.

After about a day or two of feeling really down, I realized how rich I actually am.  It hit me in the, "oh my gosh, I just remembered" kind of way.  Not just rich as in comparison to the rest of the world, which we are, but more that we are richly blessed.  We have so much for which to be thankful.  I felt kind of dumb that I had let this slip from my mind, but I also felt a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders.  Feeling sorry for yourself can get pretty burdensome.

Poverty is the curse of never having enough.  Poverty is not the state of being poor or needy, it is the state of wanting, it's the torment of never having enough.

So although I'm not going to have a professional photographer by my side to capture every moment, and they are not going to retouch them and hand them over at no cost, I'm more okay with the fact that I'm not going to get everything that I want.  I'm richly blessed.

I have come in order that you might have life—life in all its fullness.
John 10:10