Joy and Generosity Transform
The best antidote to hearts gripped by scarcity and fear
Following Jesus has never been easy—at least, it’s never intended to be so. The calling on Christians has been a call to come and die ever since the beginning (see Luke 14:25-33). A life committed to becoming more like Jesus and sharing the good news about him with others has never been one that promises comfort or ease.
We are not promised plenty, but we are promised to be blessed in our need.
We are not promised health, but we can discover the grace of God amid our illness.
We are not promised power, but are pointed toward the centrality of humility.
Following Jesus is not easy, but that’s okay once you realize that ease was never the point. The problem is that Comfort is an appealing god that we often attempt to furnish with a second throne. Threats to Comfort lurk around every corner, and the rampant evil that plagues all of creation has arguably never been as visible and apparent as it is right now. These realities yield predictable fruit.
Scarcity in Abundance
I try to live under a rock a little bit more these days than I have in the past, not ignorant of the brokenness of the world, but also not captivated by it as I have been before. Every once in a while when I stick my head out from under my rock1 I encounter two dominant realities: fear and scarcity—the first of which usually follows in the wake of the second. Let’s start with the second.
More than any other modern phenomenon, the coronavirus pandemic brought our scarcity mindset to the fore, almost exactly six years ago (!!!) when toilet paper and other household items were disappearing from store shelves despite no real indication that any shortages were afoot. The panic buying of these items ultimately acted as self-fulfilling prophecies—the unfounded fear of a future scarcity led to panic buying and stockpiling, which then actualized the scarcity everyone feared.
Since then, this scarcity mindset hasn’t really gone away, even if it isn’t at the forefront of our minds as it was back in the throes of the pandemic.
For years, homes have been hard to come by, as Boomers live longer and longer, holding onto their homes, young families like my own sit tight in “starter homes due to advantageous mortgage rates, and new home builds can’t keep up with first-time homebuyers trying to find an affordable house. Oil (and gas) prices are spiking as we wage yet another war(?) in the Middle East.
A housing crisis and conflict-fueled energy price spikes? Even pop punk music has been resurrected—I’m seeing Yellowcard on tour this summer, for goodness’ sake! The early-2000s nostalgia is in full-swing, for good and for ill!
Used cars were scarce for a while, and may still be, which has caused the used car market to be pretty overpriced in recent years. Even simple things like Pokémon cards are next to impossible to find unless you want to pay nearly double the retail price at small card shops or with aftermarket dealers.2
On top of those abundant scarcities, it’s getting harder and harder to find a job as the job market looks weaker in basically every sector except for healthcare, and the comparison between annual average salary versus home price in the United States is…concerning:
Then, of course, how can you have any conversation about anything in 2026 without asking, “How might AI play into this?” And for that I have to share a recent graphic from the Financial Times relaying research done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, depicting how AI could: 1) create a tech singularity that ends scarcity as we know it, or 2) create a tech singularity that leads to human extinction, or 3) set us on a modest AI-boosted GDP growth path of roughly 2.1%, in line with how the GDP has grown for over a hundred years:
I’m sure that if I took the time, I could probably come up with a handful of other examples of how scarcity manifests in other areas of life right now, beyond the ones I’ve listed.
These real, varied scarcities, join up with other factors to yield real, widespread fear.
Fear Itself
We do not lack opportunities to be fearful.
All the scarcities I’ve listed above are worthy causes of concern, depending upon how acutely any particular person or family feels the squeeze.
We bear witness to regional wars3 and endure rumors of world wars.
Some here in America understandably fear an increasingly authoritarian state marked by violence and mass surveillance on a scale we perhaps have not yet seen.4
And, thanks to social media and the smartphone, we have a front seat to all of it. I scrolled past a half-dozen videos of missiles and drones falling across the Middle East this past weekend while checking Twitter over breakfast.
I shared this screenshot of a tweet recently, and I’ve seen some version of this on social media a handful of times in the last month or so:
This tweet is obviously a bit cheeky, but it is an accurate representation of how too many of us are probably trying to handle the feelings of scarcity and fear that we carry. Some of us are just trying to scroll through it, but what’s actually happening is that we are scrolling ourselves deeper into the fear and/or rage we may be trying to escape. (I plan to write more about this next week.)
We fear our neighbors. Depending on our persuasion, we either wonder if they’re illegal immigrants who intend to harm us, or we wonder if they’re the kind of people who want to deport anyone who looks like they may not be from around here.
We fear our bosses or our workplaces, wondering if there is ever anything we can do to provide an untouchable sense of economic security so that we can remain employed and ward off any threats of scarcity that may arise.
We fear artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and what effects these new frontiers may have on everything from our ability to work to the mental health of our loved ones who develop unhealthy relationships with chatbots.
This all leads us to feeling like cornered rats, afraid of everything, ready to lash out at everyone. So often what leads us into that corner are moldy, poisoned bits of cheese that we pick up as we tap and flick our screens in hopes of finding something that nourishes us and give us the hope we so desperately long to deliver us from our fear.
Fear and scarcity hold our hearts in a vice, and we tighten it by our own hand.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t.
People of Joy and Generosity
I recently accepted a job offer to work for a ministry dedicated to publishing resources that help people connect with others in their local churches and grow to become more like Jesus.5 When I was interviewing with this ministry, they asked me to review their core values and share about which one resounded with me the most.
One of the core values they have is, “Joy and generosity transform.” As I reviewed the values I knew immediately that this is the one I wanted to highlight in my conversation with the team.
This value stood out to me because of everything I’ve written about fear and scarcity above. One of the best ways to loosen the vice grip that fear and scarcity have on our hearts is to live a life marked by joy and generosity rooted in the overflowing goodness and grace of God we see in Christ.
Philippians 4:4-7 is the most instructive passage that comes to mind when I consider the centrality of joy and generosity in the life of the Christian. Paul writes:
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
In a time when it is easy grapple with scarcity and be driven to fear, Christians will be set apart by how they engage their neighbors in joy and generosity.
Our graciousness, our generosity, is to be known to everyone—this is not easy (or possible?) when we are gripped by feelings of scarcity. Who wants to overflow to bless others when they fear they already lack so much?
We can find comfort in the nearness of the Lord, Paul reminds us—we don’t have to worry. If we find ourselves in need, we present our requests to God. We can choose to cry out to God instead of lashing out in fear.
If we can manage this, Paul says, if we can overflow with grace, remember that Christ is near, and take our needs to God, then we may find the peace we long for—the peace that surpasses all understanding, the peace that fulfills the scarcity, the peace that drive out the darkness of fear.
In a conversation in my community group recently, some were grappling with these feelings of scarcity and fear, and it allowed us to have a good conversation about how we might live right now in light of Everything Going On and the tenuous feelings we may have about so much of it.
Eventually the conversation led to the question, “So, like, as Christians, what happens if authoritarianism and fascism takeover in our lifetime here in America? What happens then?”
I said something like (I don’t remember the exact words), “We die. Or rather, we image Christ until we die.”
We don’t need to be afraid. We really don’t. Paul writes just a few chapters before the passage above in Philippians 1:21, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He is not being cute or trite, but mortally serious.
Joy and generosity transform. They transform us, to be sure, but they also transform others and point them to the source of our transformation—the Spirit of the living God in us. When others are being shaped by their fear and scarcity, driven to lash out at others or spiral into despair, we can take hold of otherworldly hope by way of joy and generosity rooted in the finished work of Christ.
In response to an expert in the law who asks Jesus which of the commands is most important, Jesus replies:
He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
One of the best, most practical ways we can obey this second command to love our neighbors is to overflow with joy and generosity when scarcity is in abundance and fear itself is most terrifying. In doing so, we may see ourselves and our communities transformed.
Where this most commonly happens is while I am on the treadmill at my local gym, walking and catching bits of headlines from a variety of news networks on the screens ahead of me.
I am particularly bummed about this because my six-year-old daughter is getting into Pokémon, and we can’t really ever enjoy opening packs together because we can’t find them at any big box store in our area…pretty much ever. Re-sellers snatch up all the re-stocks and just come buy out stores before normies like me can find any packs.
(Thanks to the advent of groundbreaking artificial intelligence technologies and the wedding of those technologies to government interests because of AI companies’ desperate desire to start to show a return on the trillions of dollars of investment they’ve received the last few years.)
I can and will likely share more on that organization and my work with them later.
Lovely, thank you :-)