Doing the Best We Can
I went to two grocery stores in search of ground beef and fresh chicken breasts, but came home with ground lamb and chorizo. Initially frustrated, the empty shelves quickly changed my attitude: I was lucky to find any meat at all.
Aisle upon aisle lay bare. Grocery clerks busied themselves clearing away empty boxes and trying to rearrange the few items that were left—mostly Easter candy and hummus. Shoppers were civil, but the heaviness between us was thick. Our grocery lists felt more like Christmas wishes as we wandered the aisles hoping to find anything decent to feed our families.
Scarcity nipped at my heals. I did my best to ignore it. I was not the only one looking for meat, and I refused to let fear get the better of me. “Breathe. Just get what you can, and breathe.” Never was I so grateful to leave the grocery store—a place once familiar now foreign.
Upon returning home, gratitude swelled as I unloaded my bags, placing each item delicately in the pantry or the refrigerator. In celebration, I waved the ground lamb and low-cost chorizo around in the air like a prize. The food seemed more sacred somehow.
The next evening, when it was time to make dinner, I looked at my meal plan: fajitas. Without steak or chicken breasts, that clearly wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I stood in front of the open refrigerator and pondered, “What’s the best I can make out of what I have?”
We seem to be asking that question a lot lately, don’t we? Its echoes reaching into far more things than meal planning.
In the last week, the world has been flipped on its head. Everyone has a new measure of hard. We’ve learned terms like social distancing and been introduced to what it means to #flattenthecurve. Some of us are adjusting to working from home while managing our kids e-learning. Others are worried about impending illness and its effect on compromised immune systems. For some, the isolation already has their skin crawling. And let’s not forget everyone whose plans have been canceled.
All around us is loss, and knowing how to navigate the heaviness is confounding in a world that is simultaneously so noisy and yet so distant. But here we are—moment by moment, day by day—all of us just trying to make the best out of what we have.
Our offerings may appear as scraps, but what we have is far more than we realize.
In many ways, creativity and community have never been more alive. Teachers are fostering connection and engaging students in online meeting spaces. Families are taking walks and having dance parties. Artists are sharing their masterpieces and inviting others into their craft. Churches are reinventing social media into sacred spaces and making meals for the homebound. Small businesses have started funds and invented new products to help support their hourly employees, no longer able to come into work.
Generosity is alive and well. Light continues to poke holes in the darkness, and the well of love is deep and will not run dry.
We may continue to have hard days, and let’s not sugarcoat them. Hard is hard, and it’s what we have. But it is not nothing. For here in the struggle, we are seeing firsthand what God meant when He said, “My grace is always more than enough for you, and my power finds its full expression through your weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9, TPT).
And so we lean in, knowing that God is not absent and His expression is alive through His people. We fall to our knees in mourning and celebration, soaking up every bit of sunshine that peaks through the gray. We hold our chorizo high into the air with gratitude.
Because doing the best we can with what we have is anything but scarcity. Friends, this is God’s sweet spot.