Enough is not a number

You know the feeling before guests arrive. The quick scan of the bathroom. Whether to bring out the good towels, or not, because the good towels might get used. The wine you like versus the bottle that is fine if someone finishes it. The math about the cheese. The new candle still in the drawer, saved for something. And under all of it, the question you would not say out loud: whether there is enough, and whether you will run out.

You know the other house, too. The one you walk into and relax. The friend who opens the refrigerator and says take whatever you want. The guest room with the sheets already on and a small bottle of water on the nightstand that says someone was thinking about you before you arrived. Nothing under wraps. Nothing rationed. Both houses belong to real people. Sometimes to the same person. The question is which one you live in.

There are two halves to that verse and most readers see one. The first is having: God has given wealth, possessions, the things you own. The second is harder. Power to enjoy them. Having and enjoying are two separate gifts, and you can have without enjoying. The gap between them is where most of us live, in the first house, with the candle in the drawer.

What blocks the enjoyment is fear. Fear that what you have is not enough. Fear that if it goes, more will not come. Fear that you might need it later, even if you do not need it now. Fear that the person you give it to will not appreciate it. The fear usually shows up as sensible math. What if the roof goes. What if the market turns. What if the kids need it someday. The numbers are real, which is what makes the fear so credible, and you can spend a lifetime doing responsible math on its behalf.

Christopher Watkin, in Biblical Critical Theory, describes two people eating the same cake: one eats the last mouthful slowly, afraid there will be a famine tomorrow, and the other eats the first mouthful knowing there will be a banquet tomorrow. Only the second is free to enjoy it for what it is, “without resting on it a weight of significance it cannot bear.”

One question shows what is really in charge. How much would be enough? Answer it honestly. Then remember the last time you reached the number you had in mind, and what happened to the number when you got there. If it moved, and it has moved every time you reached it, then fear was setting the number.

The Preacher has a scene for the man who never finds this out, and it is one of the darkest in his book. A man is given wealth, possessions, and honor, everything he wants, and does not receive the power to enjoy them, and a stranger enjoys them instead (Ecclesiastes 6:2). The verse does not say the man was wicked. It says he never used what he had, and then he was gone, and the enjoying was done by someone who never carried the fear. Read it twice: the sad part is that the man could have been the one enjoying it all along.

Things kept back do nobody any good. A tool in a drawer builds nothing. A skill nobody borrows atrophies. A guest room that became a storage room may still be called a guest room; you find out which it is only when someone sleeps in it. Sharing is what the stuff is for.

You cannot reason your way out of fear, and you cannot wait it out. You can only act in a direction fear says you should not. The first time you give away something you were afraid to give, it costs you something. The next time it costs less. This is not a case for giving away the rent. A small honest gift breaks the grip more than a large performative one. Open the good bottle on a Tuesday. Lend the ladder without the speech about bringing it back. Cover the camp fee you overheard being worked out at the kitchen counter, and never mention it.

Most of us are wealthy by any measure the Preacher would have recognized, and we still save the good things for something. Enough is not a number. It is a decision about who is in charge, and you can make it before the guests arrive.