Ask and it will be given to you;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
Our faith in God is such that we look to him as the provider of all we need. One of the lessons that I frequently have the opportunity to teach in my classroom has to do with being able to make a simple budget. To start off I will typically get my students to understand the difference between the things we want and the things we need.
We must trust in our Lord's goodness to provide for our needs abundantly. On many occasions I have sat beside students as they painstakingly made their list of the material things need to survive. In such an exercise my students will also make a list of the things that they want—luxuries. It's always easier to populate the want side of the list.
I too, in doing my monthly budget, have sat with my wife and together we made—or at least discussed—our list of needs for the coming month. Like my students, I have found it much easier sometimes to come up with a list of what I'd like to have just for the fun of it.
How many of us have sat down and made a list of our spiritual needs? Such is the stuff of which prayer is made! Could it be that our typical prayer life tends to emphasize spiritual wants more than needs? At least this is what comes to my mind when I hear talk—or perhaps complaining—about not being fed. Especially when I know the spiritual environment is rich by comparison to most.
However, trusting in God to provide for our needs doesn't mean that we shouldn't bring the things we want to him. Truthfully, and speaking spiritually, I desire the riches of God's love. My desire is for the good things that God alone can provide: beyond the basics I want those things that uniquely have the power to satisfy the hungry soul.
Lent provides us with a time to reflect upon need in our life versus want. However, more than simply withholding certain luxuries from ourselves, Lent gives us the opportunity to reflect upon and seek those things of things of the spirit that may have been neglected for some time.
Part of seeking in order to find, and knocking on the door to have it opened, is discovering what exactly it is that we need most. I believe that sometimes—perhaps often—Christians suffer from blindness in regard to real spiritual need. It is as though we haven't made our budget list completely. We have the want side filled out, and somehow we stand convinced that list is complete.
The last—and most important—thing I would like to say is that apart from spiritual needs and wants we live in a world in which many people lack bread to eat. In considering wants and needs it would be scandalous to exclude the material situation of our world.
We cannot ignore the real issues of poverty and we must all work to eradicate them. God provides us with the means to face the challenges of material need—yet here I must emphasize that the world in which we live cries out for justice. Thus, the challenge is one that requires tremendous faith. Each of us has a mandate to build a world in which poverty, disease, war, and hunger are no longer. We share a communal duty to build a future free of those things which, for us and in our times, are a black mark upon our world. Still, the solutions for such difficult issues are far from being unobtainable.
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