Shutterstock
In abundant life, everyone has enough and competition is replaced by cooperation. (Shutterstock Photo)
Special to United Methodist Insight | March 2, 2026
Abundant life.
Why is it hard to imagine everyone having abundant life?
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” - John 10:10
I don’t know why this verse is on my mind this morning but here it is. Scarcity is much easier to imagine than abundance. Especially universal abundance. What’s the fun in a system where everybody has what they need? Isn’t competition more fun and better motivation for most people?
Capitalistic competition in the US is government funded theft.
This is the lie that capitalism teaches us. Competition is good. But it’s not. In competition there has to be winners and losers. For someone to be rich, another person must be poor. Our categories are dialectics.
Abundance. Now abundance is good. Everybody has enough.
Did you watch the Olympics? Did you watch the women figure skaters uphold one another? Did you perceive their vision of abundance and joy? They celebrated with one another. They wept with one another. This is what the kingdom of heaven looks like.
Enough.
I’ve been doomscrolling all morning. I am debating with myself about whether I should go to prayers or just sit up here in my room and keep quiet. I need to do some 12 step work.
God I thank you from the bottom of my heart that I know you better. Help me become aware of anything I have omitted discussing with another person. Help me to do what is necessary to walk a free man at last.
To be a monk, even a neo-monastic Episco-baptist abbot type person, is an exercise in enough. Enough is freedom. The absence of comparison and competition is freedom. This is the freedom that Jesus offers us in John’s Gospel.
God came that all might have life and have it more abundantly.
Even you.
Even me.
He did not come to establish a purity cult where there are winners and losers. That’s a capitalistic reading of a pre-capitalist Gospel. Jesus’ “salvation” is universal abundance.
God so loved the world. Not some of it. Not just the righteous. Not just the pure. Not just those who kowtow to his glorious power. That’s theological malpractice.
Living the twelve steps teaches us that nothing can separate us from grace, not even the shitty decisions we make where we hurt ourselves and others. Not even death.
Jesus’ mercy overcomes death…in all its forms.
Even when we don’t get it and do the opposite of the Gospel.
This is the scandal of the Gospel. We can totally screw it up and Jesus will still come and find us, save us, overturn tables for us, destroy death for us. God’s nature is mercy. Eternal damnation is a capitalist fiction meant to convince us that God values only some of us. It’s simply anti-Gospel to make such a claim.
We can experience separation from God. We can experience cruelty and death, but they are never the last word. Love is always the last word.
Love.
The Rev. Tripp Hudgins
Tripp Hudgins is pastoral director of Richmond Hill Center in Richmond, Va. This post is republished from his Substack blog, The Lo-Fi Gospel Minute.