Abundance: It's About Purpose, Not Possessions

Years ago, when our children were small, we decided to try our hand at gardening. At the time, we lived in the high mountain desert of New Mexico where there was not an abundance of rainfall. In fact, in our location the average annual precipitation was less than 7 inches--and most of that usually fell on July 28 in one torrential downpour. That phenomenon brought interesting lessons in itself, but I'll save the Big Flood story for another occasion.
At any rate, toiling under the scorching sun to grow a tomato may not have been economical in a financial sense, but real abundance is rarely about finances. Real abundance is about the humility in understanding one's insignificance compared to Nature. Real abundance is about the gratitude and joy in having life and working with universal laws of sowing and harvesting. Real abundance is about the peace and purpose and love created in working as a family together with Nature and its laws to bring about a true miracle.
I can without reservation or exaggeration say that we were lousy gardeners. We were as far away from being Master Gardeners as a tone deaf singer is from a Grammy award and super stardom. We tried fruit trees and produced mainly dried leaves and dead twigs. We grew melons and squashes of various sorts and yielded palm-sized gourds of bitter quality. Our beans died on the vine. Our peas never blossomed. We labored, and fertilized and nurtured and weeded and sweat all summer long, only to eat our entire harvest in one salad.
We actually did have modest success with two products. First, no matter how hard we tried to limit its fertility, our zucchini results were off the charts. They seemed to reproduce with a mind of their own. Large, small, long, short--they just continued to multiply beyond reason all summer long. We couldn't give them away fast enough.
Second, we had a fair tomato crop. One day in the early fall, my youngest son and I brought a tomato from the garden into the kitchen. There we proceeded to dissect it and examine the contents. We saw juicy meat arrayed in an engineered architecture that was complex and beautifully amazing. We saw hundreds of tiny yellow seeds, each with the potential of growing bushes that could produce dozens of more tomatoes and many thousands of new seeds. Incredible abundance, right before our eyes! My son and I concluded we gazed upon real abundance, multiplied, overflowing.
Abundance is not in the possessions we might accumulate. It is not in the money that comes our way. It is not in the number of honors or awards we might collect. Abundance is in our purpose. It is in the love we share, the hearts we touch, the minds we motivate, the lives we help transform. Even one soul ignited by our generosity and goodness ripens like the tomato and bears hundreds of seeds with the potential to multiply beyond imagination.
And that is real abundance.
Light your Vision! See the Change!