Beggars Don't Quit

Desperate people do desperate things. Desperation drives us to do what we would have never considered doing. Extreme hunger drives a once finicky eater to eat garbage. Who knows what we might eat under extreme circumstances.

Satiated people can be choosy. It's easy to sit down to a meal of fine wine, a Caesar salad, prime rib, and cheesecake and disdain the beggar in the alley behind the restaurant pawing through the dumpster for scraps the rats haven't already consumed.

Beggars can't afford to be choosy: beggars can't quit begging.

Jesus taught his followers to pray out of desperation: "Ask and you will receive, search and you will find, knock and the door will be open for you" Luke 11:9. But that doesn't happen too often because we are spiritually obese. We have a ton of "wants" but not too many legitimate needs. We "want" just about everything we see. We need very little. So we pray out of overload, not desperation. We pray for more elaborate and expensive stuff. We don't pray for the ordinary things we can easily provide ourselves. We are self-indulged. Pampered. Spoiled.

Desperate we're not.

We ask but not out of grave desperation. We seek but not out of utter hopelessness. We knock but not out of extreme urgency. Our prayers are casual, flippant, nonchalant, routine verbal exercises in half baked spirituality. If we get what we want that's great! If not, we'll look somewhere else.

Is it any wonder our anemic prayers are little more than empty words rattling around in space signifying nothing?

Basic spirituality begins with desperation: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" Matthew 5:3. Blessed are the bankrupt, the beggarly, the undone, the ruined, the desperate. The desperate receive the kingdom; the pampered miss out.

"Your blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule" Matthew 5:3, The Message.