From Max Lucado and his book ‘Traveling Light’:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Psalm 23:1
Come with me to the most populated prison in the world. The facility that has more inmates than bunks. More prisoners than plates. More residents than resources. Come with me to the worlds most oppressive prison. Just ask the inmates: They will tell you. They are overworked and underfed. Their walls are bare and bunks are hard.
No prison is so populated, no prison so oppressive, and, what’s more, no prison is so permanent. Most inmates never leave. They never escape. They never get released. They serve a life sentence in this overcrowded, under-provisioned facility. The name of the prison? You’ll see it over the entrance. Rainbowed over the gate are four cast-iron letters that spell out its name:
W-A-N-T
The prison of want. You’ve seen her prisoners. They are “in want.” They want something. They want something Bigger, Nicer. Faster. Thinner. They want. They don’t want much, mind you. They want just one thing. One new job. One new car. One new house. One new spouse. They don’t want much. They want just one.
And when they have “one,” they will be happy. And they are right—they will be happy. When they have “one,” they will leave the prison. But then it happens. The new car smell passes. The new job gets old. The neighbors buy a new television set. The new spouse had bad habits. The sizzle fizzles, and before you know it, another ex-con breaks parole and returns to jail.
Are you in prison? You are when you feel better when you have more and worse when you have less. You are if joy is one delivery away, one transfer away, one award away, or one makeover away. If your happiness comes from something you deposit, drive, drink, or digest, then face it—you are in prison, the prison of want.
That’s the bad news. The good news is, you have a visitor. And your visitor has a message that can get you paroled. Make your way to the receiving room. Take your seat in the chair, and look across the table at the psalmist David. He motions for you to lean forward. “I have a secret to tell you,” he whispers, ” the secret of satisfaction. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want'” (Psalm 23:1 NKJV).
David has found the pasture where discontent goes to die. It’s as if he is saying, “What I have in God is greater than what I don’t have in life.”
You think you and I could learn to say the same?
Think, for just a moment about the things you own. . . the house you have, the car you drive, the money you’ve saved, the jewelry you’ve inherited and the stocks you’ve traded and the clothes you’ve purchased. Envision all your stuff, and let me remind you of two biblical truths.
Your stuff isn’t yours. Ask any coroner. Ask the embalmer. Ask the funeral home director. No one takes anything with him. When one of the wealthiest men in history, John D. Rockefeller, passed away his accountant was asked, “How much did John D. leave?” His accountant’s reply? “All of it.”
. . . All that stuff—it’s not yours. And you know what else about all that stuff? It’s not you. Who you are has nothing to do with the clothes you wear or the car you drive. Jesus said, “Life is not defined by what you have even when you have a lot” (Luke 12:15 MSG). ~ Max Lucado, Traveling Light (Nashville, Tennessee by Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2001) 29-31 (continued)
