Enough That Never Feels Like Enough

Denise realized it in a supermarket aisle, of all the places, and it was not dramatic and nobody around her noticed anything.

She was holding two of the same thing, comparing them, and she caught herself thinking the sentence she had thought about four hundred times that year: it's fine, it's enough for now.

And she stood there with a tin in each hand and thought: when did that word stop working.

Because it is true. There is enough. She could show you. The flat is fine, the job is fine, there is a small amount saved that she does not touch, her mother's care is settled and paid for by an arrangement that has held for three years. By every measure Denise could name for you, out loud, on paper, there is enough.

And the word enough goes through her like a spoon through water.

She has said it to herself so many times as a way of stopping herself wanting something that it has been worn completely smooth. It used to mean here is a floor. Now it means do not ask for more, and those are not the same sentence, and somewhere in about nine years the first one turned into the second one without her noticing.

What got her was a woman at church, the following Sunday, who prayed over somebody else in the row in front and used the word, and used it the other way. Denise did not catch the whole thing. What she caught was: and there is enough of Him for this, there is more than enough, there always has been.

There is more than enough.

Denise stood in a row of chairs with her hands at her sides and had to look at the floor for a while, and she could not have explained it to one person in that building.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the tins.

She thought: I have been using that word as a lid for nine years, and somebody just used it as a door.

Let me say the word properly

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman standing in a supermarket aisle.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a floor, not a number that stops the wanting. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And this article is for one particular reader, so let me name her. She has enough and the word has stopped landing. If you are actually short, if enough is not a worn-out word but a thing you genuinely do not have this month, then nothing on this page is asking you to settle, and an article that did would deserve to be closed. Real lack is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a word that has been used as a lid, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Sufficient is not a small word

Paul asks three times for something to be taken away and does not get it, and what he gets instead is one sentence that has held up a lot of people for two thousand years, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to worn out people ever since.

But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

Now listen to where the sufficiency is located, because this is the whole thing.

He does not say the amount is sufficient. He does not say the circumstances are sufficient, and He certainly does not say Paul's situation had improved, because it had not and it did not.

He says my grace is sufficient. The sufficiency is in a Person, in the present tense, and it is spoken to a man whose circumstances stayed exactly as they were.

That is a completely different word from the one you have been carrying. Yours means the floor is high enough that you may not ask for anything. His means there is a Person here, and He is enough for what is actually happening, and asking is not the problem.

You are not ungrateful for the way the word has worn out. You are somebody who has used one word as a way of managing nine years of legitimate want, and it has done the job so many times that it has gone smooth in your hand. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between hearing a verse about grace and having a word come back to life.

And here is what is true of you this evening, before you know one thing about the next nine years. You have today, and the word says His grace is sufficient in the present tense, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a body in a row of chairs.

What the word has been doing for nine years

Think about what got you in that row. It wasn't the prayer. It was not even for you.

It was: there is more than enough of Him for this. It was one word used as a door rather than as a lid, in your hearing, by accident. You were starving to hear it that way, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the smoothness. The word has been a lid because you have been the one holding the room together for a long time, and a person holding the room together cannot afford to notice what she wants, so she needs a word that closes the subject quickly and quietly. It has worked. That is why it is worn.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never told to stop wanting. God did not ask you to make yourself small enough to fit inside what you have. Jesus asked a man who was obviously blind what he wanted Him to do for him, which is either a strange question or the kindest one in the Gospels, and He was in that row of chairs while you were looking at the floor.