Living Richly

Today I had the delight of meeting a new friend - one of those people who is so refreshing, grounded, and accessible that it just makes the day seem...richer. When I got home, I started thinking about what it is to live richly. Lately it seems that every time I turn on the television or read the on-line news services, there is nothing but impending financial doom. From rumors of recession to the crash of the real estate market, to record numbers of forclosures to escalating consumer debt, many of us are finding ourselves watching our pennies and trimming our budgets. What does it mean to live richly?

Last year my family became a statistic. My husband became a casuality of the downturn in the real estate market and lost his job as a title examiner, a job that had provided quite nicely for our creature comforts. We started looking for creative ways to live well in spite of this misfortune, and found that we could feed our gardening habit by exchanging plants, bartering for plants, and shopping the "soon to be thrown out" bins at the local gardening center. In this process, we even made some new friends - fellow gardening junkies - and in spite of the job situation, we ended up with a lovely garden (until the drought, but that's for another post...) We also started to shop smarter, and connected with a network of fellow cheapies and found that it's almost fun (and somewhat competitive) to see who can purchase the most food for the least money. In fact, we got so good at this that we have been able to pretty consistently donate several bags of food to a local ministry. We lived richly, not just in that we were able to more or less maintain our "standard of living" while my husband was under-employed, but in the connections and friendships that were established. And we were humbled. We became more compassionate, more generous with our resources, more aware of our over-consumption, and more creative and intentional in our use of time and money. We discovered that we lived more "in community" than we had in the recent past, and were thankful that we had food on our table and a roof over our heads. And we found our hearts broken - broken for those who were not as lucky as we are - those who were hungry or lonely or hopeless. And we found that a big of part of living richly is the realization that hope and peace are not grounded in what we have in the bank, but rather in living the fullness of life in generosity, thankfulness, and humility.

About the time all this happened to us, the 12-year-old son of a friend was diagnosed with cancer. I know that his family has a renewed understanding now of what it means to live richly, to enjoy those moments of grace and peace and respite from suffering, and to be thankful to God for the gift of life.

Each evening as we sit down to dinner with our children, I take a moment to look at them - really look at them - at the miracles that they are - and I live richly, deeply, and fully in gratitude and thanks. I wish each of you those moments of grace that remind us that the richness of life is in the beauty of relationship and community.