Common Cents # 14 – Of Hogs and Horses

Common Cents # 14 – Of Hogs and Horses 

Throughout my teen years in Southeast Kansas, my family lived in the country and had a variety of farm animals. Along with the chickens and goats, we had hogs and horses.

My regular before and after school job was to feed the animals. The hogs were always scary. They would charge at me when I had a bucket of food, then race each other to the feed trough. The biggest and fastest would then fight the slower and smaller hogs, trying to keep all of the food for themselves.

The horses would come in from the pasture and patiently wait in their respective stalls until I brought each one a bucket of oats. The hogs acted as if each morning meal would be their last and would gladly fight for every bite. Eventually they were right as they went off to become bacon, pork chops, and ham. The horses were rewarded with fancy saddles, got to ride in parades and lived out their years in green pastures.

As humans, we can decide which perspective we want to emulate. The scarcity view is like a hog, believing that there is only a limited amount of anything important.  The abundance view is like the horse’s apparent opinion that there is an endless supply of oats not only today, but in the future as well.

We see these two perspectives play out in many areas of life. Do we feel like we have to grab for everything we can today, because there is limited supply, racing to the store to buy what may be the last roll of toilet paper? Do we not have enough because the big, mean, powerful hogs chased us away from the trough? Or do we see the world from a different viewpoint as big beautiful place with enough love, joy, food, and energy for everyone? The Abundance Philosophy believes there is plenty of room to grow food if we use the land properly, and even if we run out of oil and coal, we will never run out of sun and wind.  Perhaps it also helps to do just a bit of advance planning to avoid the stress of the times we’ve lived through recently.

In business, scarcity says that there are winners and losers. Abundance thinking means when someone wins, we all benefit from the victory in some way.  We can fight like hogs or pull together like a good team of horses.

Jesus said that he came that we may have life and have it abundantly. God’s abundant provision is a consistent theme throughout the Bible. Whether we see the world through the eyes of scarcity or see it as an abundant place, we are right. The negative thinking of scarcity will lead to difficult and stressful days and it rarely turns out well. The optimistic life of abundance will lead to hope that green pastures will prevail.