Back when the Underground was on 7th Avenue there was a room we would sometimes use for prayer. Located at the top of the stairs, it had an off-white carpet and a variety of pillows, couches, and chairs. Bibles and blank sheets of paper sat in the back right corner. There was even a small boombox you could use for ambiance. Perhaps it was only fitting that, like the place in Acts 1, this space became affectionately known as the “upper room.” When we held our week of 24-hour prayer, we prayed in the upper room.
One time though, the Underground designed this space to help our community engage issues of justice and global poverty. I remember a display talking about how the world would look if it was made up of a hundred people. There were backpacks and other school supplies coupled with information about how much it cost to sponsor a child’s education. It was there I learned that 20% of the world consumed 80% of the world’s resources and just how many people lived on less than two dollars a day.
What I couldn’t shake though was how little it cost to help kids in third world countries. For $10 I could send a year’s worth of school supplies to a kid who desperately needed it. For $18, I could help a kid fight mosquito-related illness we took for granted. Perhaps it stuck out to me because I was a college student, and, like most college students, I didn’t have a lot of money. It felt like I was always coming up against the wall of my own need. Nothing ever seemed like it was enough. Yet with the money I would use for lunch, I could buy kid’s school supplies for a year. For a dollar a day, I could keep a kid from starving. Suddenly, it felt like I had all the money in the world. Ten bucks wouldn’t get me much at the mall, but, in the hands of God, it could save a life. If ten dollars could do that, what could twenty dollars do? What could God do with a hundred dollars?
I wanted to give it all away, to galvanize friends and family to help end poverty. Of course, I know now it’s more complicated than that, but at the time it felt like the power was in our hands. The decisions we made had real effects on the global poor. How could we live lives that reflected their existence? Maybe, as one person, I could only do so much but together we could do something massive. In the hands of God, what seems like a little is actually more than enough.
This seems to be a recurring theme in Scripture. I think of Gideon’s 300 soldiers or the feeding of the five thousand. We see what we have and know it’s not enough, yet our willingness to take whatever little we have and give it to Jesus allows for something incredible to happen. He creates abundance from scarcity.
Lately I’ve been fascinated by the idea that certain things can only be gained by giving them away. This, too, seems to be recurring theme in Scripture. Proverbs talks about how “one gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.” What if there are things in our lives that can only be gained by giving them away?
Andy Crouch has explored this concept as it pertains to power in several of his books. A surefire way to feel powerless is to pursue power. To do so is to quickly realize the limits of your command. You may oppress or subdue others for the sake of self-preservation, but you’ll never feel secure. You’ll know that at any moment it can be taken from you. When you view power as a limited resource, it slips through your hands. But what if the secret is not how much power we have, but how much we give away? What if the two are directly proportional?
I distinctly remember a meeting where I wanted to empower the students I was working with. I was trying to take student leadership seriously and so I gave them the authority to determine what would be an effective strategy for reaching the campus. I might’ve even put the name of the club up for grabs, I don’t quite remember. After some deliberation, the most mature student, the one with the most potential to overthrow me turned to me and asked me what I thought. I gave them power and in turn they gave it back to me. They recognized my authority.
Contrast that to my early days of staff work where I fought tooth and nail to get students to listen to me. I’d recruit for conferences only to have them choose other ones. I even remember one particular day, leaving the office on a call with one of my “leaders” trying to convince them not to waste their time and energy on a particularly troublesome student. Despite all my protestations, they refused to listen. They were adamant they could help. In a fit of rage, I hurled my keys to the ground and broke my keychain. I don’t remember quite what I said but I’m pretty sure it was something about me being the staff worker and them having to listen to me. It was in that moment I knew I’d lost them. I’d always said if I had to pull that card, it’s because didn’t actually have authority in their life and there I was. Those were some of the hardest days in my ministry career. In the absence of real power and authority, I tried to take it by force which only reinforced the reality that I didn’t have it.
Perhaps this is why Jesus said those who try to save their lives will lose them but those who are willing to lose them for his sake will find them. In holding onto our lives, we realize their limits, their inability to be all that we hoped or dreamed of. Like money and power, our lives are found in giving them away for Jesus’ sake. The reality is that to live in abundance, to give away the little we think we have, is a sacrifice. It does cost us something. It costed the poor widow her mite. But on the other side of the sacrifice is something we could never lose, which, according to Jim Eliot, isn’t a foolish trade whatsoever.
Tomy Wilkerson 