Scarcity or Abundance: Which Story Are We Living?

The Reverend Kay Dennis, Deacon

Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

When the Israelites stood in the wilderness, their first response to freedom was fear. They had escaped Pharaoh’s lash, but their imaginations were still enslaved. Though they had seen the Red Sea part, they longed for the comfort of Egypt. “If only we had died there,” they said, “where we sat by the flesh pots and ate our fill of bread.”

That lament is not ancient history. We too live in the wilderness between deliverance and fulfillment. Though we have been promised life abundant, we cling to the story of scarcity. We are children of a culture that measures worth by accumulation and security by control. The question before Israel is still before us: Whose story will we inhabit—the story of Pharaoh or the story of God?

Pharaoh’s world runs on anxiety. It is an economy of endless production and fear. There is no rest, only the dread of not having enough—enough wealth, enough status, enough safety. That same fear governs us today. It drives our markets, fuels our politics, and fills our homes. We hoard and compete, convinced that if we do not seize, we will lose.

This is not only an economic crisis but a spiritual one. Pharaoh’s story insists that everything depends on us. It whispers that we are self-made, self-sufficient, and therefore constantly at risk. The result is exhaustion. The people of God, liberated in theory, still live like slaves in practice.

Into this wilderness of fear, God offers another story. When the people cry out in hunger, God sends bread from heaven—manna, enough for each day and no more. Those who tried to hoard it found it spoiled overnight. The lesson was unmistakable: the Creator is not a tyrant but a giver.

Manna was more than food; it was formation. God was shaping a community that would live not by anxiety but by trust. “Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage” (Exodus 16:18). The story of manna is a direct challenge to the story of Pharaoh. It insists that creation is sustained, not by human striving, but by divine generosity.

To live by manna is to live by faith. It is to believe that what we receive is a gift, not a wage. It is to trust that grace will meet us again tomorrow.

Such faith runs against the grain of the modern world. We are trained to believe that rest is laziness, that generosity is risky, that satisfaction is failure. Yet Sabbath and generosity are precisely the signs of God’s abundance. To keep Sabbath is to declare, “We will not be ruled by Pharaoh’s fear.” To give freely is to proclaim, “We believe in God’s economy of enough.”

These practices are not moral niceties—they are acts of resistance. They expose the idols of productivity and profit for what they are: false gods that demand sacrifice but never give peace.

The gospel declares that the story of scarcity has been broken once and for all. On the cross, Christ enters the famine of our world and fills it with the abundance of divine love. In his resurrection, the world’s calculus of fear and possession is overturned. The kingdom of God is not founded on scarcity, but on grace that never runs out.

The church, therefore, is called to live as a sign of that divine abundance. Every act of generosity, every open table, every moment of trust becomes a small foretaste of the new creation where “none will hunger or thirst anymore.”

So, the question remains: Which story are we living?

If we live by Pharaoh’s story, we will exhaust ourselves chasing what cannot satisfy. But if we live by the story of God—the story of manna, Sabbath, and resurrection—we will discover that grace has already provided enough.

Even in this anxious age, manna still falls. The bread of heaven still sustains. The invitation is the same: Gather enough for today and trust that tomorrow will come with mercy.