May God give you more and more mercy, peace, and love.
Jude 1:2 NLT

In North America we are kind of obsessed with “more.” More storage on our laptops, more mileage per tank of gas, more returns on our investments, more minutes on our phone plans, more, more, more…

Sometimes I wonder if more will ever become enough (doesn’t seem so when it comes to Gigs on our hard drives, or other storage devices!). I read a short story recently in which the characters were faced with never feeling like anything was “enough.” They would eat themselves sick if they didn’t learn to curb their endless appetites. Sometimes it feels like we live that way. There is a frightening trend toward consumerism that is rife in our society.

And I have long suspected that this obsession with “more” has to do with the fact that we don’t have enough of certain things. Not that we don’t have enough of the things we strive to have more of – no, wanting more of those things is a symptom. I suspect what we don’t have enough of is neatly summed up in the last four words of this verse “mercy, peace and love.”

I suspect if we had enough of those things, the other things would seem a lot less important. I suspect if we had enough of those things, our hunger for more would start to wane. I suspect if we had enough of those things, we would be more concerned with what others might need and less concerned with what we ourselves want.

So I stand with Jude, praying that God will give you (and me!) more and more mercy, peace and love. So that we all might be filled up with the right things and emptied of our desire for the wrong things.