I am writing 31 fighting scarcity. I will be collecting them all at the starting point. I hope you join me this month. 

Speech team was a major part of my college career. A major part. Like art majors spend all day in the art studio, hang out with the other hyper creative types and the creative writing majors all smoke cigarettes outside the english building, I spent hours in the top floor of the communication department and all weekends with the team, even if we weren’t traveling to a tournament.

I am back at my college and judging now. I am the old stodgy person wondering why everyone is doing the events WRONG!

WRONG. It is really really easy to change, or have something change and decide that either the new or the old. must. be. wrong. I have changed a lot since college. I mean I hope I have. If you get from 22 to 30 without your thoughts evolving on something I am not sure you are paying attention.

And here I am, on my old stomping grounds, remembering. Remembering when I was in this coffee shop and taking classes in this building. Even just watching the generic white vans from all the speech teams across the midwest pull into the parking lot is taking me back,

Part of me is cringing, embarrassed by the way I used to think so clearly and strongly on nuanced subjects. How things were RIGHT and WRONG. And a part of me is wistful for the way it was so easy, how I didn’t hem and haw and say “it depends” when people ask me about what I think. I am embarrassed by how I wasn’t a very good listener.

Scarcity is telling me that I can’t like both of us. I can’t have affection for the girl I once was and be proud of the person I have become. But, as we are learning this month, scarcity is a liar. I don’t have to be embarrassed about the way I used to think or the things I used to say.

I had to be her to get to who I am now.

Abundance allows me to honor the people and places I used to be. Abundance says everyone does the best we can with what we have, and being different now doesn’t mean we can’t honor where we were, and that we were also doing the best we could when we were that person.

Abundance says that the Holy Spirit changes with the wind, and there is a lot of room for everyone to grow and change, without being embarrassed that they had to.