If I handed you a million dollars tomorrow, would all your money problems disappear?
Most people would say yes. I’m not sure I agree.
We’ve all met someone with very little money who seems remarkably at peace, and someone with a great deal of money who is constantly anxious. We’ve met people who earn enough but never feel secure, and people who have been through real hardship and still remain generous, hopeful and grounded.
Which makes me wonder whether most money problems are really money problems at all. Or whether they’re trust problems. Fear problems. Identity problems. Worthiness problems that money simply happens to expose.
Money touches some of the deepest questions in our lives. Am I safe? Will there be enough? Can I trust God? Can I trust myself? Am I actually worthy of receiving? And I think the conversation is far less about what’s in your bank account than most of us assume. It’s more about what’s happening in our hearts.
So let’s start where the pattern usually starts — with what we inherited, long before we ever earned a dollar.
For a lot of us, the earliest message about money was scarcity. Not enough. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Hardworking parents with limited funds coming in, so if you wanted something, you didn’t always get it, because there wasn’t always money for it. That’s a normal, human beginning. But we now live in a world where scarcity isn’t just something we experienced once, in one household — it’s constantly talked about, everywhere, all the time. It has become the backdrop of daily life. And what we inherit emotionally, before we’ve earned anything, is the fear of not having enough now, and the quieter fear of whether there will be enough later.
Here’s the part worth sitting with: you can be entirely surrounded by abundance and still operate from a scarcity mindset. You can have more than enough, and still make decisions as though you have almost nothing. I’ve seen this in myself. There was a season built around a simple holiday — flights booked, a trip planned, everything covered — when a fuel shortage started dominating the news. There was more than enough money for the holiday. The resources were there. But there was a whisper in the background that there wouldn’t be enough fuel, and for a couple of weeks, that whisper very nearly won. Not because the money wasn’t there. Because the mindset was under siege.
That’s the thing about scarcity. It isn’t really about the money. It’s a misplacement of trust — trusting in what’s in the bank account, or what the news is saying, rather than in what’s actually true.
There’s an old story that keeps coming back to me in this context: Adam, in the garden, surrounded by everything — provision, purpose, an intimate relationship with God, an entire creation to steward — and his attention was consumed by the one tree he couldn’t have. Not the whole garden. One tree.
I think that’s what scarcity does to most of us. It makes everything we’ve already been given go blurry, and brings the one thing we don’t have into sharp, aching focus. Gratitude works the other way around. It makes the missing thing blurry and brings everything else — the whole garden — back into view.
So here’s a question worth asking yourself honestly: what’s the one tree you’ve been staring at, while the rest of the garden goes quietly unnoticed?
None of this is an argument against being sensible with money. Living below your means is wise — it makes room to save, to invest, to give. But there’s a difference between living below your means as a deliberate, faith-filled choice, and living below your means because you’re still, underneath it all, afraid there won’t be enough. One is stewardship. The other is scarcity wearing a disciplined outfit.
A simple rhythm worth naming: give first, save consistently, and live off the rest. It sounds almost too plain to matter. But it’s the plainness that makes it sustainable — it isn’t a formula for getting more, it’s a posture of trust that doesn’t depend on the number in the account matching your comfort level before you’re willing to be generous.
There’s a parable about stewardship that has stayed with me — the one about the servants entrusted with coins. Two of them took what they were given and put it to work. One buried his single coin under a rock, because what if it wasn’t enough, and what if he lost it? He wasn’t punished for having less. He was addressed for what fear had made him do with it. Burying what you’ve been given, out of fear of losing it, is its own quiet form of scarcity. Stewarding it — even imperfectly, even with the risk that some of it won’t yield anything — is the far braver posture.
And that leads to something I think we don’t say often enough: for a lot of us, this isn’t really a giving problem. It’s a receiving problem.
Think about the last time someone gave you a genuine compliment. Did you receive it, simply and gratefully? Or did you deflect it — oh, it was nothing — before it even landed? We tend to think of that deflection as humility. It isn’t. Humility is seeing yourself rightly, not less than. Downplaying what you’ve been given isn’t modesty. It’s a quiet form of disqualifying yourself from something that was already yours to hold.
And there’s a cost to that pattern, beyond the moment itself. If you can’t receive a small compliment graciously, you’ll struggle to receive a bigger blessing when it arrives — an opportunity, an increase, a breakthrough — because you’ll have spent years training yourself to minimise. Nothing will ever feel like quite enough, not because there isn’t enough, but because you’ve never practised the muscle of receiving it.
There’s a version of this that shows up in the story of the son who left home and, having made a mess of things, decided he’d only ever be fit to work as a servant in his own father’s house. But walking away never changed whose son he was. The identity was never actually in question — only his willingness to receive it back.
I think a lot of us carry some version of that. We’ve made a financial mistake, or a decision that didn’t pan out, and somewhere along the way we let it become a verdict on our worth instead of simply a decision that didn’t work out the way we’d hoped. But your worth was never built on your track record with money. It was never something you earned in the first place.
If you feel trapped in scarcity right now — and I mean genuinely trapped, the kind where the thoughts loop and the fear runs the decisions — the first shift isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s smaller and larger than that at once: disagree with the fear and the scarcity as the default story, and deliberately, actively seek God as your source, rather than the account balance, the job, or what the news says this week.
Because the real transformation doesn’t begin when the circumstances change. It begins when the way you see them does.
Scarcity asks, what’s missing? Stewardship asks, what has already been entrusted to me? Fear asks, what if there isn’t enough? Faith asks, what has God already provided?
So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, the same one this conversation ends on: what is one area of your life where you’ve been focusing on the one tree, instead of the whole garden?
If this reflection gave you something to sit with, you can listen to the full conversation with my co-host Liezel
Odette
