17. You are enough

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.”

Let’s start at the beginning. This whole story started in Eden, remember? Eden was God’s original design for His kingdom. It was both a garden and a temple—the place where God dwelt with mankind. In the garden, Adam and Eve were living in a reality of abundance. They were one with their Maker and one with each other. Their lives were full of purpose, and entirely free from anxiety. They didn’t need to worry about food or clothes, God had provided everything they needed. Their job was to nurture and tend creation, to be fruitful and multiply—expanding the borders of Eden and filling the whole earth with God’s glorious kingdom.

Like Eden, the kingdom of God is a place of abundance. It is a place where we have everything we need to thrive. It’s where we know with our whole heart that we have enough and we are enough. In God’s kingdom, we don’t have to be like kids at birthday party fighting over the spoils of a piñata, working and fast and hard to make sure our candy piles are bigger and better than everyone else’s. In God’s kingdom the supply is unlimited—there will always be more so we don’t have to fight to store up for ourselves. We don’t have to fight to make sure that we’re seen because we’re the most beautiful, intelligent, gifted, liked, etc. We are seen, we are loved, there’s nothing else to be done but to live in the abundance. You can give freely knowing that there will always be more. You can rejoice in other people’s accomplishments knowing that you have nothing to prove.

Tragically, most of us spend our lives living in a entirely different kingdom. The kingdom of this world, or the kingdom of darkness, is a place of scarcity. It’s a place defined by the lie that you will never have enough and you will never be enough. It’s a place where we all become like poor, orphaned children, fighting for the last scrap of bread. The enemy of our souls wants us to spend our whole lives competing with each other for limited resources. In this way, we are divided from each other and isolated as we fight our way to the top of the heap, consumed by competition and ambition. We pay huge sums to inject our bodies with dangerous chemicals that promise to make us stronger, faster, skinnier, younger and more beautiful. Stronger and more beautiful than whom? We sacrifice marriages and children, friendships and communities in order to build more successful careers. If we can just accumulate enough money, we will be safe, we will be in control. How much is enough?

Are you starting to see where anxiety comes from? We are anxious because we are seeking the wrong kingdom. Because Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us with a love that is bigger than we can comprehend, He wants us to be free from the anxiety that enslaves us when we devote our lives to the lies of the kingdom of darkness. He offers His disciples a solution: “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” This is an invitation to come home. The anxiety that is eating away at so many of us is a symptom of a greater disease. It’s a disease that we’ve acquired as exiles, children living far from our intended home and purpose. We were not designed to live as orphans. We were made to nurture and be nurtured in God’s garden kingdom of abundance.

If we want to seek the kingdom of Heaven, we have to realign ourselves with Jesus and what He is building, namely, relationships. First, seeking the kingdom of God means building a relationship with our Maker. This means setting our gaze on Him, worshiping Him and allowing Him to wrap us up in His healing love. It means sitting with Him daily while He reminded us that we are enough and there is nothing, nothing we can do to earn His love. This has to be the first thing we build and the first relationship we nurture. From the overflow of our relationship with Him, we are called to build marriages, families and communities centered around His love. Building relationships is much like the slow quiet work of tending a garden. Rooted in Jesus, our lives will branch outward, bringing life and flourishing with us everywhere we go. As we begin to realign our priorities with His, everything else in our lives will find its proper place. By beginning to see the abundance we’ve already received in Him, we’ll spend less and less time thinking about all that we think we need. And we might just find that our lives are a little less plagued by anxiety.