Just Enough

A friend of a friend asked me to open my bank account to give her some monies.

My first response was offense. I felt it before I understood it — a kind of bristling in the body that arrived faster than any thought could. And then, underneath the offense, something quieter rose up: poverty of spirit and poverty of speech.

Not hers. Mine too.

Because I know what it is to look at what someone else has and mistake it for the Source. I have followed models I thought were the shape of "enough" — in relationships, in worship, in what a life with God was supposed to look like — without asking whether they were bread or only looked like bread from a distance. I have scrabbled. Compromised. Removed my own cautions because the hunger for depth was so real that I let it override the wisdom that should have walked beside it.

I was under the illusion I was seeking God. Most of the time, I was seeking a person, a pattern, a proof that I had found what was missing. The seeking was sincere. It was also, quietly, misdirected.

There is a prayer tucked into Proverbs that names this with more honesty than almost anywhere else in scripture. Agur asks God for one thing above most others:

"Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread."

He understood that both extremes pull a person away from God — too much, and we start to trust ourselves; too little, and we start to reach for whatever is near, however it comes, whatever it costs. He was not asking to be spared need. He was asking to be kept in the middle, where trust actually has to happen, because you cannot hoard your way out of needing God, and you cannot scramble your way into peace.

I am learning to live in that middle now. In most areas of my life. The trusting. Handling what has been entrusted to me — emotionally, physically, spiritually — in ways that honor the One it actually belongs to.

That is a wider assignment than money. It means I do not scrabble for connection the way I once did. I do not grasp physically at what was never mine to hold. I do not borrow someone else's spiritual model because my own path felt too quiet, too slow, too uniquely mine to trust.

This came clearer to me thinking about the Lord's Prayer, and about centering prayer. Jesus did not hand down a mold to be poured into. "After this manner," he said — pointing toward a shape, not demanding a duplicate. Somewhere along the way, "after this manner" quietly became "exactly this," and freedom hardened into formula. The contemplatives understood this. Centering prayer was never a technique to master. It was a doorway, and every person who has gone deep through it eventually finds their own way through — because the room on the other side is the same room, but nobody arrives at the door from the same direction.

I was made to seek God according to how I was uniquely created. Not according to a model borrowed from someone else's life, even a good one. The stillness I am after was always going to look like mine, not like anyone else's.

So this is where I am living now, most days. Not ignoring the thoughts that need tending — but not staying there either. Turning them over. Trusting the Trinity with what surfaces, and letting Selah be what comes next. Not resolution. Just the pause that trusts the resolving is already being handled.

Neither poverty nor riches. Just enough — received again, tomorrow, and the day after that.