Is the Abundant Life Really Possible Anymore?

Re-thinking and Re-imagining a life marked by thriving rather than surviving

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Is the Abundant Life Still Possible?

The search for a life, marked by the word: “abundant” has been my life-long pursuit. I think this search and quest for a this kind of life, have taken people across the globe and throughout time. Some have promised they have found how to live it. Some have died while trying. People of every tribe and tongue search and write about how to find it and how to live it. It is the perennial longing of the human soul to live and thrive.

It is because I sense we are entering a time where a “Great Resignation” is happening. We are enduring. We are persevering. But are we really living? We are resigning ourselves that a better life may not be possible anymore. We are “done.” Done with church; done with politics; done with religion; done with everyone and everything and call it a life. It is serious business to be stuck. It is serious business to be filled with more anxiety than with joy. It is serious business to live so happy and unfulfilled. 

I don’t know who you are talking to, but the folks I listen to are nervous, not confident.  They  are riddled with anxiety, feeling “low” more days than they are feeling optimistic. We are not watching the news anymore because of an agreed upon confession: “I can’t take it anymore.”

So, I felt it time to address this and layout a better way to live—a better way to do life. I see this as a three part series of Substack entries and I will try to layout my thoughts over the next few weeks.  Some of you who are new to me, might think, “Where is he going with this?”  Some of you may roll your eyes wondering, “Why on Earth is Steve talking this way when what we need is a strategic plan to get us out of this mess we are in?”  Well, bear with me and let me lay this out in a way that is marked by my own sense of urgency and through the trusted voices that are informing my thinking. 

The search for this peace, this sense of abundance is described in poem and song. It is seen in shows, plays and fiction. It is documented by memoirs, biographies and history.

The quest to really live before we really die, marks the human longing and sets up apart from grasshoppers, black bears and scallops in the sea beds who exists but do not long for a better life.

The poet, which I also call, a prophet, Mary Oliver puts this longing this way:

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

For me, like so many of you, I set out determined, to not only find, but to live my one, and only life, with meaning, purpose, rigor and enjoyment. I wanted a sense of satisfaction—something more than mere happiness. I wanted to find the chalice of life and to drink from it deeply and wholeheartedly.  The utterly amazing words of Mary Oliver  helped me to know that I wanted what she wanted. I wanted to live like she describes living:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life  I was a bride married to amazement.  I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.  When it's over, I don't want to wonder  if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,  or full of argument.  I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver gets me thinking about the condition, situation and lives of people who lived in the 1^st century when Jesus showed up offering a totally different message on how to find this kind of life.  These dear people were enmeshed in the quagmire of a religion that bound them up, and weighted them down, rather than set them free.   Over two thousand years later, I know see how religion does that—it can thwart, rather than enable us, to really live the life we somehow know is possible.  The scholar, novelist and sage, Wendell Berry is helpful to me here. He writes:

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

― Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

What I love about Wendell Berry is his invitation: “Well, you can read and see what you think.”  That one statement is of uber importance. Why? Because the search for the abundant life, really is an individual journey, not intended for masses and mega movements. It is a deeply personal journey for every single soul and every single soul must thirst and want it for themselves. Berry echoes the way Jesus, himself offered his whole new way of living. It was about individual choice; individual  thirst and hunger and with deep, personal implications.

Every person wants a life marked by a sense of “more,” “satisfying,”  “content,”;  “full” and “meaningful.”  We can add descriptors and adjectives to help us unpack what the term “abundant” means in different generations and ethnicities, but what is at the core of each effort to define this life—what is agreed on, is that this life—a life marked by a sense of abundance, sounds palpable and profound.  We wake up when we hear this kind of life being talked about. It is alluring. It is primal. It is what we want and it is what we need. 

The Spanish writer, Antonio Machado helps when he tells us this:

“All the words of Jesus Christ can be reduced to two: Wake up!” 

This is not about being “Woke”, this is about waking up from a long, slumber in our souls that tease us into thinking the abundant life really isn’t possible anymore—not in this day and age. And it is right here, that I feel such a need to stand up and say this: This particular time we are living in, filled with anxiety, bewilderment, hostility, cynicism and resignation is precisely the time we need to re-define what the abundant life really is and describe how it is still possible to live in such a way that melts our shared despair and inward sighs.

Thomas Kelly, a Quaker and beautiful writer penned these hallmark words that help us grasp an abundant life:

Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”

This “premonition of a richer way of living” is a beautiful and inviting phrase that seems to describe the very teachings of Jesus in his famous “Sermon on the Mount” where he describes a life, a blessing and a way to live, that is “wholly other” than the ways offered people to live in the first century and today as well. In these days of political debate and uncertainty, it would serve us all well,  if we would just consider reading, Matthew 5-7 every day to re-familiarize ourselves with this “richer way of living.”   In three chapters, Jesus describes in detail a way of life that is possible and has implications and applications into our search for blessing; our challenging relationships with others, an ethic of living that is about love, not laws. Seriously, why not take the weeks of Lent and decide to read Matthew 5-7 and “see what you think?”

By the way, this “richer way of living” has absolutely nothing to do with material prosperity. That erroneous way of thinking is an American phenomenon, now exported globally and taught by people who are actually uninformed about what I want to attempt to explain in what follows. We are sickened by preachers who talk this way; living exorbitant ways and out of touch with reality and Jesus, himself.

My Pilgrimage to Find the Abundant Life

I am fortunate to have been able to write a trilogy in three separate books about my quest and my understanding of the abundant life. My writing documented my own life struggle with the radical new insights I gained in my pilgrimage which kept pushing me to deeper understanding.

In 2008, I sat out to write a book about my own attempts to live an abundant life. The Lazarus Life became my most “successful” book; translated into many languages and became one of the publisher’s best sellers.  It is my own memoir of identifying my life with that of the sick and ailing Lazarus who wanted to live despite the fact that Jesus didn’t show up to heal him or fix his situation.  It took me two years to write that book and within the pages I offer the reader the invitation to identify with Lazarus and his own journey of wanting to live but not really knowing how.

I followed that book with a sort of sequel called, The Jesus Life.  This is the book where I layout the “way” that one lives there life if there’s any hope of a life being marked by all the adjectives of living in an “abundant way.”  I walk the reader through eight ways we can re-arrange our lives to foster a sense of abundance in our lives.  When Dallas Willard, my mentor, read this book, he wrote a robust and compelling endorsement which only validated the fact that I was close—very close to figuring out how one really does cultivate a life marked by abundance.

Then, to help me go even further, I wrote Inside Job , where I attempted to show that the starting place to live an abundant life was inside—not through trying to reach the many outer markers of success that the world has offered us.

What I want to do now, is to go further to the edge of my understanding and say what I am discovering in this season of life where I am stepping off the stage of public life and living a more contemplative life, a life I have written about and described.

How I can say it best, right now and right here…

First of all, the abundant life is a life where one is required to take an inner journey to question, unhinge and unlearn all the assumptions, cultural shaping and stories we have amassed that gave us hints about what life is really about.  It is an interior journey where we look back and within into our stories and find the truth; explore the lies and find the courage to say, “I need help to live a different kind of life. I cannot do this by myself.  I’m stuck in my wounds; bound by the graveclothes of a unhealthy family of origin and am stuck.” 

In short, the abundant life begins when someone dies inside. By “dies inside”, I mean they become so desperate for help that they confess they need a savior—someone to come and actually rescue them from the jaws of death.  This is the necessary beginning of a life marked by abundance.  We are invited and called to live a life marked by abundance when we first, know that we cannot find the way to live this life on our own.

Having begun then to live with eternity in mind, the quest to really live, begins.  The spiritual life is an arduous journey that is marked by valleys and mountains and all the spaces and places in between. 

The abundant life is a life where abundant deaths are required.  Anyone who has ever searched for the abundant life is a witness that life is full of many challenges, defeats, walls and predicaments.  Thomas Merton has offered us clues to the challenges of the spiritual life. Merton was a Catholic Monk who became a prolific and best selling spiritual writer in the mid-20^th century until now. His succinct and sobering overview of our challenge is best said here:

“There is no spiritual life without persistent struggle and interior conflict. This conflict is all the more difficult to wage because it is hidden, mysterious and sometimes almost impossible to understand. Every serious Christian is willing to make a few initial sacrifices. It is not hard to make a good start. But it is hard to continue, to carry on the work begun, and to persevere in it through many years until the end…

...It is perfectly true that we die with him in baptism and rise from the dead: but this is only the beginning of a series of death and resurrections. We are not “converted” only once in our life but many times, and this endless series of large and small “conversions,” inner revolutions, leads finally to our transformation in Christ.”

Merton writes sobering words—words that need reflection and consideration:

Persistent struggle.

Interior conflict.

Hidden and mysterious

Sometimes, almost impossible to understand.

Hard to continue.

Persevere in it through many years until the end.

A series of deaths and resurrections.

Perhaps this is precisely what Jesus, himself meant when he described that the way to live this life is hard, narrow and “only a few find it.”

Let me say this has plainly as I possibly can:

The abundant life is lived through many abundant deaths.

Our conversion; our baptism, christenings, and more markers may only be our beginning. What follows that great beginning in a series of predictable deaths and letting go’s of how we thought life would be and life would look to discover the many wonderful resurrections that happen to us as ‘come back to life” and live more freely and more lightly that we ever though possible.

Our many deaths happen through the decades of our lives, if we are fortunate to live a life marked by seasons and spans of time. If we live long enough, we will all begin to have disappointments, disillusionments and discoveries that life brings to every single person with absolutely, no exception.  Cancer, divorce, being fired; losing a loved one; losing security; losing our sense of belonging and more—all are instruments that aid and assist us to die and surrender. We learn to surrender our way for another way. We relinquish and re-learn  and in some mysterious way, not fully comprehensible, we receive something that helps us to flourish and live again.  Each death, according to Merton is a sort of “conversion” or in the Apostle Paul’s own words, “we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”

Each death is a surrender. Each act of letting go prepares us to keep moving forward—tasting bit by bit—drinking in an ounce of inner abundance which only grows as we pilgrim onward, upward and through the many stages, phases and seasons of our lives.  The poet Robert Frost said it this way:

Something

 we were withholding

Made us weak—

Until we learned

It was ourselves we were withholding

From this land of living—

And thenceforth

Found salvation

In Surrender.

The abundant life is a life of working these things out. We work them out just as the followers of Jesus did in living under foreign rule; in hostile and dire conditions and under threat of persecution and physical death. We learn that the abundant life is not marked by external markers but internal ones. We learn that this life of abundance is best described as a life that has the fruit of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22).

We work them out the way the Jews did when in the Auschwitz and death camps they faced and endured unimaginable suffering. Yet, in this place we have the writings of survivors such as Elie Wiesel[i] and Victor Frankl. [ii]  Frankl told us plainly about the search for an abundant life when he wrote this:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Here it is: We change ourselves. We change ourselves and experience transformation to because we choose to live in a whole and different way—even in the midst of the odds and difficulties we are experiencing outwardly in life.

Nearly all the spiritual writers over the centuries agree here.  An abundant life is not about amassing, achieving and acquiring. It is marked by surrender and a redeemed way of re-engaging with the world to offer change, hope and cultural transformation. The key here is both inward and outward. The abundant life is not just an inner life. It is a life that compells a person to act, engage and usher in change, justice and a better way of living.

What we need now are leaders who live both an inner life and an outer mission. If one has only an outer mission, he or she might feel compelled to bring change but it will implode because an outer mission without an inner core is simply not sustainable. It is both—not just one way of living.

 These writers, sages and prophets stood against the winds of a blowing culture set on enticing us to avoid the inner journey.  But together, with one voice they say this: There is an inner journey that one must take if one really wants to be free and well and really alive. It is the inner journey to the very Source of Life—that fountain inside that is fresh, alive and teeming within where the soul’s thirst is quenched indeed.  Those on the inner journey; those live with the mandate of the Sermon on the Mount as both our ethic and ethos will live, indeed!

More on the Inner Journey

The apostle Paul attempted to describe this so well in one of his prayers for the people who lived in Ephesus—people like  you and me who were trying to discover this great inner life that would equip them well in their daily lives of struggling to make life work and to integrate their faith with their daily struggles of having enough money to live; enough work to make life happen and navigating their own anxieties, inner turmoils and pressures of the world. Paul said this:

¹⁶ May He grant you out of the riches of His glory, to be strengthened and spiritually energized with power through His Spirit in your inner self, [indwelling your innermost being and personality], ¹⁷ so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through your faith. And may you, having been [deeply] rooted and [securely] grounded in love, ¹⁸ be fully capable of comprehending with all the saints (God’s people) the width and length and height and depth of His love [fully experiencing that amazing, endless love]; ¹⁹ and [that you may come] to know [practically, through personal experience] the love of Christ which far surpasses [mere] knowledge [without experience], that you may be filled up [throughout your being] to all the fullness of God [so that you may have the richest experience of God’s presence in your lives, completely filled and flooded with God Himself].[iii]

²⁰ Now to Him who is able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly more than all that we dare ask or think [infinitely beyond our greatest prayers, hopes, or dreams], according to His power that is at work within us, ²¹ to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen.

Goodness! What a passage containing both a prayer and a way to live this wild and crazy life we have been given. Just read that prayer again, perhaps before you move on. It’s staggering. But it’s also a prescription for us—antidote to our stuck lives.

The Abundant Life Requires a Re-Ordering

What I am saying here is counter-cultural. Of course it is, because the Abundant Life is all about a spiritual way of living which is sometimes, also counter-intutitive.   It’s mystery combined with practical guidelines of how to live this way. Finding, then living a life marked by abundance requires tweaking, adjusting, amending, and altering our lives all along this incredible journey of life.

One of the writers said it this way:

Let’s take a good look at the way we are living and reorder our lives under God.—Lamentations 3:40 The Message.

In Part 2, I will explore our current dilemma and how many of us feel robbed, cheated and victims in a world now marked by anything but a sense of living an abundant life. The existential peril of our current times is eroding our own belief in the church—because so many leaders have failed us and disappointed us within the walls of the church: some have sex scandals; some have power scandals.; some are hypocrites and some are abusive. Where do we find hope? How do we find others on the same journey so we can collaborate, encourage and live this out together?

In Part 3, I will explore how the abundant life changes as we age and mature and how in a person’s “senior” years, a robust understanding of true abundance is needed in the demise and loss of health in the aging process.   I will explore the “secret of contentment” and how we learn this through and in the midst of the hard and pressing times of our lives—such as the times we are experiencing now and with so, so much uncertainty ahead.

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In this season, I am doing a sort of re-ordering of my own life and thoughts. I am searching for a lighter load—a load I best described in a poem that I want to offer you here.  If your own search for the Abundant life has left you tired and worn out, then join me in reading my poem where I try to say what my heart is really needing and wanting—a lighter load.  Scroll down to read the poem and it is only available to those of you who support my work.