Batman sings Human League.
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I was pretty bummed about coming into work today. A combination of multiple 5AM mornings, the fact I was missing breakfast with some of my favorite people, and knowing that we had an extreme shortage of produce today made it an undesirable day to work. I worked the salad bar today, which means prepping, stocking and filling organic produce throughout the day. As I was preparing the salad bar, we were incredibly low on a lot of produce. I spent time thinking about how I could mask this shortage. After all, who wants to eat from a half empty salad bar? Then I got to thinking about abundance and scarcity. How our God is abundant, but we tend to live in a way that shows that we don’t believe that. We live like there is a scarcity of things, love and joy. We try to hoard these things, not realizing that our hoarding is causing us to miss out on the abundance. For example, I often find myself trying to find joyful moments, and trying to orchestrate them. Rather than living out of an abundance of the joy that comes from living in grace. So I hoard joyful moments trying to make myself joyful. My biggest problem this morning was that I was out of greens. I had just a little lettuce, enough to fill about 5 salads. How do you have a salad bar without lettuce? And when it was gone, I just had to wait until the delivery arrived, was unloaded and then prepped. I was anxious until that next moment would come. But God surprised me today. After thinking about abundance and how I rarely live into that, I was faced with my own shortcomings. I don’t live into joy in a way that expresses the gospel fully and I don’t approach life in a way that allows God to show his abundance. But as I’m thinking about this, one of my team members from produce comes over and says, “Could you use this?” On his cart was a pile of little containers of lettuce. I was excited. It was all lettuce that expired tomorrow so they knew they couldn’t sell all of it. As I prepped it, I was hit again with how God provides out of joy. I think God is pretty funny. And as I unloaded the final container, I realized there were exactly 40 of them. 40 is a biblical number that means “a lot.” Thanks God. The joy is abundant today.
