- Scarcity and Stewardship
- It just occurred to me how the parable of the talents applies to this: “well done thou good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things and I will make you master over many things.”
- Having stewardship over many things with ample resources to meet every need and contingency leaves untested many of the important skills of good stewardship.
- Facing a choice between good, better, and best when we lack the resources to say yes to all helps to hone our skill at identifying what is best vs what is simply good.
- Facing choices between equally good things allows us to exercise our agency and indulge our preference among the options (although this can be practiced just as well without scarcity).
- Being steward over scarce resources encourages us to recognize and appreciate the difference between needs and desires.
- Wise stewards having scarcity will get creative in how they:
- Juggle competing needs
- Identify alternative resources
- Engage outside help
- Humble stewards will be willing to ask for help when they have unmet needs and when they identify opportunities that might not be needs but will help to grow their resources and personal capacity.
- Profligate or greedy stewards will grasp at anything they can gather rather than retrench and secure a stable position for the future.
- Sometimes the solution to scarcity is to gather more resources, other times the solution is to reduce expenditures, commitments, or expectations.
- There is a vest difference between scarcity caused by a lack of resources and scarcity caused by a misallocation of available resources.
- Throwing more resources in when the problem is misallocation only encourages the problem to grow worse.
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