Have you heard that phrase?
Maybe you've said that yourself.
What do people mean by that?
I suspect that people mean many different things by this.
I suspect a large part is that we are thinking that much of the stuff we were doing before this time of lockdown needs to be critiqued, reassessed and some (maybe much) of it needs to be dropped.
- A lawyer said that the amount of work their office took on was too much - unsustainable.
- Someone running a business was saying that the pressure coming from clients was getting greater and greater - unsustainable.
- Friends are saying that time with their children has been so precious that they don’t want to lose their connection afterwards - it was unsustainable.
There is an ancient wisdom saying that speaks into such unsustainability.
In the book of Proverbs, in the Old Testament, we read in chapter 30
8 Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. 9 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, 'Who is the LORD ?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonour the name of my God.I agree with many of the voices who say to me “I don’t want to go back to the way it was before”.
I think that that life we lived before March 2020 was not sustainable.
But it is not enough to say that I don’t want to go back.
We need to find keys to a new way forward.
And part of that is rooted in this ancient wisdom…
“neither poverty nor riches”Maybe the new word is ENOUGH.
Not too much or too little for anyone
BUT enough for everyone.
I believe that that can be sustainable and might change the future.
But that requires rethinking.
That requires making different decisions...
- about what we buy,
- about why we buy what we buy,
- about who we buy from,
- about what we think is necessary,
- about how we share resources,
- about a whole lot of stuff.
ENOUGH means thinking christianly.
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