Enough

I try in life to not be governed by fear, for that not to be my motivation in doing or not doing anything. That’s harder than it sounds. I try to not parent out of fear, to not lead my corps out of fear, to not live my life from a place of fear. Fear limits our imagination, sending us down all kinds of rabbit holes instead, it cramps our potential and stops us reaching out and pressing on. It ends up making us live smaller than we were designed to.

I’ve had enough, I’m calling it out. I've become convinced that fear is the enemy’s response to God’s invitation into something great. When I see fear, I’m trying to take that a green flag to keep going; this is something worth fighting for.

One of the big fears that seems to hound my experience of partnering with God is, ‘what if we don’t have enough?’ What if we don’t have enough people, enough room, enough faith. The list goes on and here’s the biggie: what if we don’t have enough money? It's like we forget that God holds the purse strings to all the resources we could ever need. With closing down all of our programme we would be shutting down some of our main income streams.

God’s provision was promised to the people for a triple harvest in the run up to the Sabbath – to provide for the Sabbath year, and seed for the following year. When we were starting the year, people kept telling us how brave we were for going for it. I think this is the place where our courage was really tested – would there be enough?

And you know what? We’ve seen God so abundantly provide for all our food needs. Straight after we started the Sabbath year in September, came the abundance of harvest donations from schools and churches. We had more come in than we have ever had before, the cupboards were overflowing! We had to massively rearrange to create more space. We could hear, as we were stacking and sorting those tins, God’s well-done, his promise to always be one step ahead of us, with ENOUGH.

The only one of our programmes we have kept in place this year is the Food Bank. We were convinced from Exodus 23 that one of the key functions of the Sabbath is to allow the poor to eat from the land, out of everything that no one else was harvesting. All these tins have amply met the increasing need that we’ve served this year.

We serve lunch 5 days a week, a simple meal of soup and a roll, where every one chips in to make, serve, clean up. We all sit round one table and eat together. There’s such a beautiful atmosphere of unity and community that is so different to how lunch club used to be. It’s often chaotic, and can get a bit flustered, but there are no cliques sat around the same table week in week out, never learning other people’s names. There are no people burnt out and running around at other people’s beck and call, but rather an attitude of serving and working together. On a good day. It gives dignity, it levels us out, as volunteer washes up next to homeless guy, and we always squeeze an extra bowl out of the pot if someone comes in late.

We make all the soup ourselves, and since we started making soup, an amazing group called ‘Food for Charities’ has started coming round every week bringing surplus food from the supermarkets for us to cook with, and bread to put in food parcels. Recently, one of the couples who collect, sort and deliver the food have started joining us for lunch, and are being loved and included in what God’s doing in and through us.

Part of the question we had in beginning our Sabbath year was what does it mean to work, what are things we can stop, what are the things we need to carry on? We found out that even before the year started we were praying more, as we were asking God, ‘do we keep selling papers? Can we stop collecting for the year?’ 

As it happens, the dates worked out that we could collect our Big Collection (fund rising for The Salvation Army’s social services) target for 2014 before the Sabbath year started, and the year ends early enough for us to squeeze in some collecting in September 2015. Which means a year of no collecting! Something absolutely unheard of, I’m still not sure how we managed to score that. I’ll let you know in September how we get on with meeting our targets! But everything we’ve seen this year shows me that God’s provision leaves no room and no need for fear. He’s got this covered.