How Are You Feeling About The Future?

Shifting our mindset from scarcity to abundance.

What is your posture toward the future?

When you think of how God will act in the coming days, are you filled with intense optimism and excitement toward the future? Or, in the words of Parker Palmer, do you fear that you’ll “wake up some day lost in a trackless wilderness?”

For me, the answer is simple.

Most days I dread what’s around the corner. I worry about how God will work out complicated situations and lingering personal issues. I fear that I’ll soon wake up in a trackless wilderness with nowhere to turn.

Maybe you can relate?

I know I’m not alone in this. I know that many people—especially young people—worry about their futures. They worry about their own place in the world and the world their children will inherit. The road ahead is foggy so despair inevitably sinks in.

But this doesn’t have to be the whole story.

While sharing this struggle, I was recently challenged by someone not to have such a scarcity mindset with God—but an abundance mindset.

Here’s what that means.

The mind of scarcity

A scarcity mindset gives into despair.

This internal dialogue says, I’m not sure how this is going to turn out…what’s plan B, C, and D? I need to figure things out ASAP! It puts our imaginations into hyperdrive, robs us of peace, and sends us sailing recklessly forward on our own strength.

A scarcity mindset defaults to, God has carried me this far but perhaps I’ve depleted his resources and this is it.

And at the end of the day, when we lay down in our bed at night, scarcity looks to the future with dread.

The mind of abundance

The narrative is different with an abundance mindset.

In abundance we tell ourselves, I can’t wait to see how God is at work in this difficulty. Things are confusing and difficult but God is always up to something!

An abundance mindset says, Israel’s God doesn’t faint or grow weary—he’s got plenty of strength to assist and grace yet to dispense. Abundance looks to the future with joyful expectation of how God will act in our lives.

Where is your mind?

The reality is we’re all living somewhere on the spectrum of scarcity to abundance in our posture toward God and the future.

It comes with the territory of living in a brutally broken and complicated world. So start by asking yourself, what situations in life am I dreading the outcome of and anxious to fix? Don’t beat yourself up for impending anxiety, use it as an opportunity to reflect and seek the Lord.

Use these questions as the perfect avenue to let the God of abundance fill you with peace and make a way forward.

This doesn’t mean things will turn out as we’d usually like—comfortably and pleasantly. God’s future for you may involve intense hardship. Jesus assures us that we all have our own crosses to bear in the life of discipleship.

But God’s abundance says that no struggle we’re in, no disappointment we face, no death we endure, and no cross we bear is beyond his ability to draw near, bring peace, and usher in his glory.

So grapple with abundance in the midst of frustration, disappointment, and the questions of tomorrow with the expectation that in all that lay ahead, our God will meet us.