Are You Living In The Land Of Scarcity?

I'm currently in Cotati, California visiting my sister and mom and when I arrived there was no toilet paper in the guest bathroom.  When I brought this to my sister's attention, she said, "Oh yes, we've needed to get to the store and buy a few things and we really need to do that today..."  An extra roll was found in another bathroom and somehow in the busyness of the day we didn't make it to the store that day or the next.  Later, I noticed what appeared to be an eight pack roll of toilet paper in an upper cabinet.  The next time the toilet paper crisis came up, (now my mother was out of toilet paper in her bathroom), I mentioned my discovery.  There was delight and surprise that there was an abundance of toilet paper in the house... all the while everyone was scrabbling around and moving the scarce resource from bathroom to bathroom.  Seems like a lesson in this to me...


I think that many times in our lives we live as though there was scarcity in our lives even though we are really living in the midst of abundance, we just don't recognize it.  I'm not just talking about toilet paper here.  Maybe we feel lonely and lost and there is really a wealth of support all around us we just haven't made our needs know.  Maybe we think we can't be successful, but we really haven't tried long enough or hard enough.  Maybe we blame our finances on a bad economy or our unemployment on a lack of jobs but we just haven't recognized our true talents and gifts and applied them in the right area.  There are lots of examples of this kind of scarcity mentality... much of it has to do with our perception and our willingness to look at our world in a new and sometimes challenging way.  What about you?  Are you living in the land of scarcity when there is really an abundance of opportunities all around?