To be blessed and yet permit gluttony to blind me to the blessings is to banish myself to a life of unrelenting poverty even though I might be utterly engulfed in the embrace of a million marvelous blessings.

Having lived with nothing is the gift that allows me to appreciate the privilege of having everything.

Having ‘nothing’ is a great gift because there is a great good to be learned in poverty, and part of that lesson is that the bounty of material wealth might be the biggest ‘nothing’ that there is.

If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have ‘nothing’ so that I can finally learn how to appreciate ‘everything’.

Yet it seemed that God would derive infinitely more pleasure and draw intimately closer to the likes of us by putting majesty squarely in a manger. God made the poverty of our existence the place of His home.

Perfect majesty that deliberately chose to be born into abject poverty, walk a road of perpetual poverty, and be unjustly executed in the raw nakedness of poverty is utterly ludicrous unless I realize that this is the single and sole way that God can reach me in the suffocating poverty that I myself have created.

Greed is the fast-track to poverty.

I can amass countless fortunes and yet stand with empty hands. I can seek God and have fortunes that fill countless hands.