A Theology of Abundance
What next year’s buds teach us about Thanksgiving
November’s garden shivers like an empty Eden: cast off, cast out, trampled and thorny. The season of backyard romance is long gone.
Nothing remains for the harvest. All the basil we never pulsed into pesto, every forgotten tomato fallen beneath leafy cages, every last bean that escaped my eye—they are all frozen now. Withered and waiting for winter.
What was not picked is gone forever.
Or is it?
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Gratitude can run rampant as weeds when your garden is bursting in late summer, sun-bathed and fruitful, thanks be to God. Everywhere you turn you see more waiting, more than enough.
But then comes the slicing cold, the biting wind, the thinning light. Nature offers no soft vision in frozen months. Like the bony fingers of barren trees, a theology of scarcity claws up from the hardened earth.
Your sight shrinks, too: only what was undone, only what was not enough.
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The Christian tradition has long held prayers of thanksgiving to be central to our relationship with the Creator. The Psalms stand strong as our songbook of praise, even as lament and curse wind through the ancient verses, too.
But what about when we don’t want to give thanks?
Truth be told, this is a year I am grateful to be ending.
I hate to admit this shoulder-slump of a confession, not a rah-rah rally cry to the Thanksgiving table. I’m weary of another year spent in survival mode, wondering when we might thrive, despairing at our divisions, evil, and lies. Grieving what could have been saved.
The most that I can muster right now is a prayer of thanks to have made it through.
I see scarcity everywhere.
Yet the harvested garden and the barren trees hold hidden abundance. They protest my prayers stuck in scarcity mode.
To listen to the Psalms or the prophets—or to sit at the feet of Christ himself—is to be called to a theology of abundance.
Scripture pours out this vision of enough for everyone, a land brimming with milk and honey, a table set before our eyes, a cup overflowing. The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the sick will be healed, the dead will be raised, the captives will be set free.
Can I believe such abundance under November’s grey skies? When our land is plagued by disease and injustice and callous cruelty?
Beyond the scarcity we see, how can we pray with praise that speaks truth of what is and sings praise for what will be?
November faith calls us to conversion. To dig for hope in the midst of scarcity. To remember a theology of abundance. To believe in beyond.
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Did you know trees bud before autumn?
The nubs of next year’s hopes don’t arrive in spring; they simply swell to full sight in those thawing months. But most deciduous buds are already growing in late summer, even as leaves are dropping from the branches. The buds stay small and hidden while trees go dormant for winter’s long, dark sleep.
We see buds sprouting when spring awakens, but the truth is they have been waiting all winter long. This simple gift of science feels like solid hope in bitter times, a soft promise of brighter seasons.
May what we miss or mourn turn out to be the bud of next year’s thanksgiving.
May we trust God is already growing more than enough beyond our eyes.
Peace,
Laura
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