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I love my metro pass

In January, due to only being in school for three weeks of the month, I did not purchase an all-access metro and bus pass. Instead, I bought blocks of tickets, thinking that I would save money. In the end, I spent 25 cents less than if I had bought a monthly pass, and I found myself counting and calculating every trip, wondering if it was worth spending a ticket on it. I hate that. I don't want to be evaluating an unscheduled trip to a friend's house or a fun evening out on the basis of whether or not I have enough tickets in my pocket.

Yesterday, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was once again covered for the month, free to travel as much as I wanted, here and there, to and fro, to stop in at friends' places for coffee, to run downtown for a movie or lunch with the gang, to spontaneously make a stop on the way home from class to shop for a niece's birthday or a random gift. No running of the numbers in my head necessary. I am free of the worry of running out of tickets before the month is done.

Last night I realised that this is exactly the place I am trying to live in as it regards our finances and overall provision in life. To be continuously counting and measuring and hoping not to run out takes a lot of fun and enjoyment out of the journey. And in the end, it will probably work out about the same when I add it up.

A week or two ago, I was reading a story in Matthew 14 about Jesus feeding the crowd. Bunches of people had been following him and listening to him teach and watching him do some pretty incredible things. At the end of a long day, they were hungry. The disciples immediately came up with a perfectly logical solution: send the people away into town so they can buy food, because there's nothing out here in the middle of nowhere. Jesus' reply was classic: there is no need to dismiss them. You give them supper. And they took what they had and Jesus made it enough.

You see, when you are next to Jesus, there is no need to go anywhere else to get what you need. We are so used to getting spiritual input from church, food from the grocery store, hardware at Canadian Tire, books from Chapters, and clothes from the mall. We know where to go for what we need; it seems logical. But Jesus is way beyond our small logic. When we are with him, we have access to everything we need. When we leave him to go elsewhere for our daily needs, we end up spending part of ourselves that we don't have to, and this results in feeling needy and counting and calculating to see if there will be enough. With Jesus, there is always enough. He prepaid. Not just for a month but for your whole life. That feeling of freedom from having a monthly metro pass, that's just a fraction of the freedom we can feel when we know that God will provide for all our needs in Christ Jesus.

I love my metro pass. Thank you, OPUS.
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