I've been reading He Leadeth Me, by Servant of God, Fr. Walter Ciszeck. The book is his spiritual meditation on his 23 years in Soviet solitary and hard labor prisons. It's powerful witness on many levels, but I found his discussion of his moment of his abandonment to God's will interestingly related to abundance/scarcity.

Below, I've pasted the excerpt where he describes his moment of abandonment, and I've emphasized where the parallels with scarcity and abundance arise. Further below, I've jotted a few thoughts on why the Christian may have to go past abundance and on to abandonment.

He begins with a consolation of the agony in the garden:

Suddenly, I was consoled by thoughts of our Lord and his agony in the garden. “Father,” he had said, “if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me.” In the Garden of Olives, he, too, knew the feeling of fear and weakness in his human nature as he faced suffering and death. Not once but three times did he ask to have his ordeal removed or somehow modified. Yet each time he concluded with an act of total abandonment and submission to the Father’s will. “Not as I will, but as thou wilt.” It was not just conformity to the will of God; it was total self-surrender, a stripping away of all human fears, of all doubts about his own abilities to withstand the passion, of every last shred of self including self-doubt.

He goes on to notice that what is in the chalice itself is the strength of Grace, and the chalice is being offered to him. If only he will drink. This strength he mentions here (and in more detail below) is very similar to the indomintability of the abundance mentality:

What a wonderful treasure and source of strength and consolation our Lord’s agony in the garden became for me from that moment on. I saw clearly exactly what I must do. I can only call it a conversion experience, and I can only tell you frankly that my life was changed from that moment on. If my moment of despair had been a moment of total blackness, then this was an experience of blinding light. I knew immediately what I must do, what I would do, and somehow I knew that I could do it. I knew that I must abandon myself entirely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God. And I did it. I can only describe the experience as a sense of “letting go,” giving over totally my last effort or even any will to guide the reins of my own life. It is all too simply said, yet that one decision has affected every subsequent moment of my life. I have to call it a conversion.

Now, he flashes back a bit to what looks like his former scarcity mindset:

I had always trusted in God. I had always tried to find his will, to see his providence at work. I had always seen my life and my destiny as guided by his will. At some moments more consciously than at others, I had been aware of his promptings, his call, his promises, his grace. At times of crisis, especially, I had tried to discover his will and to follow it to the best of my ability. But this was a new vision, a totally new understanding, something more than just a matter of emphasis. Up until now, I had always seen my role—man’s role—in the divine economy as an active one. Up to this time, I had retained in my own hands the reins of all decisions, actions, and endeavors; I saw it now as my task to “cooperate” with his grace, to be involved to the end in the working out of salvation. God’s will was “out there” somewhere, hidden, yet clear and unmistakable. It was my role—man’s role—to discover what it was and then conform my will to that, and so work at achieving the ends of his divine providence. I remained—man remained—in essence the master of my own destiny. Perfection consisted simply in learning to discover God’s will in every situation and then in bending every effort to do what must be done.

Now, with sudden and almost blinding clarity and simplicity, I realized I had been trying to do something with my own will and intellect that was at once too much and mostly all wrong. God’s will was not hidden somewhere “out there” in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me an act of total trust, allowing for no interference or restless striving on my part, no reservations, no exceptions, no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate. He was asking a complete gift of self, nothing held back. It demanded absolute faith: faith in God’s existence, in his providence, in his concern for the minutest detail, in his power to sustain me, and in his love protecting me. It meant losing the last hidden doubt, the ultimate fear that God would not be there to bear you up. It was something like that awful eternity between anxiety and belief when a child first leans back and lets go of all support whatever—only to find that the water truly holds him up and he can float motionless and totally relaxed.

Once understood, it seemed so simple. I was amazed it had taken me so long in terms of time and of suffering to learn this truth. Of course we believe that we depend on God, that his will sustains us in every moment of our life. But we are afraid to put it to the test. There remains deep down in each of us a little nagging doubt, a little knot of fear that we refuse to face or admit even to ourselves, that says, “Suppose it isn’t so.” We are afraid to abandon ourselves totally into God’s hands for fear he will not catch us as we fall. It is the ultimate criterion, the final test of all faith and all belief, and it is present in each of us, lurking unvoiced in a closet of our mind we are afraid to open. It is not really a question of trust in God at all, for we want very much to trust him; it is really a question of our ultimate belief in his existence and his providence, and it demands the purest act of faith.

He returns to the moment when he accepts the chalice and drinks, and knows God will thereafter "always provid[e] opportunities":

For my part, I was brought to make this perfect act of faith, this act of complete self-abandonment to his will, of total trust in his love and concern for me and his desire to sustain and protect me, by the experience of a complete despair of my own powers and abilities that had preceded it. I knew I could no longer trust myself, and it seemed only sensible then to trust totally in God. It was the grace God had been offering me all my life, but which I had never really had the courage to accept in full. I had talked of finding and doing his will, but never in the sense of totally giving up my own will. I had talked of trusting him, indeed I truly had trusted him, but never in the sense of abandoning all other sources of support and relying on his grace alone. I could never find it in me, before, to give up self completely. There were always boundaries beyond which I would not go, little hedges marking out what I knew in the depths of my being was a point of no return. God in his providence had been constant in his grace, always providing opportunities for this act of perfect faith and trust in him, always urging me to let go the reins and trust in him alone. I had trusted him, I had cooperated with his grace—but only up to a point. Only when I had reached a point of total bankruptcy of my own powers had I at last surrendered.

He continues that the effect was pivotal, affecting even his "habitual actions," imbuing them with "liberation" and a "fresh new wave of confidence and of happiness ... freed thereby from anxiety and worry, from every tension, and could float serenely upon the tide of God’s sustaining providence in perfect peace of soul." Sounds like abundance to me.

That moment, that experience, completely changed me. I can say it now in all sincerity, without false modesty, without a sense either of exaggeration or of embarrassment. I have to call it a conversion experience; it was at once a death and a resurrection. It was not something I sought after or wanted or worked for or merited. Like every grace, it was a free gift of God. That it should have been offered to me when I had reached the limits of my own powers is simply part of the great mystery of salvation. I did not question it then; I cannot question it now. Nor can I explain how that one experience could have such an immediate and lasting effect upon my soul and upon my habitual actions from that moment on, especially when so many other experiences, so many other graces, had had no such effect. It was, however, a deliberate act of choice on my part. I know it was a choice I never could have made, and never had made before, without the inspiration of God’s grace. But it was a deliberate choice. I chose, consciously and willingly, to abandon myself to God’s will, to let go completely of every last reservation. I knew I was crossing a boundary I had always hesitated and feared to cross before. Yet this time I chose to cross it—and the result was a feeling not of fear but of liberation, not of danger or of despair but a fresh new wave of confidence and of happiness.

Across that threshold I had been afraid to cross, things suddenly seemed so very simple. There was but a single vision, God, who was all in all; there was but one will that directed all things, God’s will. I had only to see it, to discern it in every circumstance in which I found myself, and let myself be ruled by it. God is in all things, sustains all things, directs all things. To discern this in every situation and circumstance, to see his will in all things, was to accept each circumstance and situation and let oneself be borne along in perfect confidence and trust. Nothing could separate me from him, because he was in all things. No danger could threaten me, no fear could shake me, except the fear of losing sight of him.

The future, hidden as it was, was hidden in his will and therefore acceptable to me no matter what it might bring. The past, with all its failures, was not forgotten; it remained to remind me of the weakness of human nature and the folly of putting any faith in self. But it no longer depressed me. I looked no longer to self to guide me, relied on it no longer in any way, so it could not again fail me. By renouncing, finally and completely, all control of my life and future destiny, I was relieved as a consequence of all responsibility. I was freed thereby from anxiety and worry, from every tension, and could float serenely upon the tide of God’s sustaining providence in perfect peace of soul.

Abundance mentality is unquestionably very powerful and transformative. It's probably what the "magnanimous man" Aristotle described as having.

But the way it is typically presented in RP theory is that "Chad has abundance," meaning that the world is full of goodies and he can always get another goodie (usually a woman), because he's Chad, an that makes him confident, generous, and unflappable.

This always fell just short of the mark for me.

For starters, Chad will die, and so will the world and its goodies. Chad's abundance flows from a positive feedback loop - Chad has goodies all around, Chad perceives abundance, Chad exudes abundance, Chad gets more goodies, Chad gets Chadder. But the goods of the world are finite and fleeting. The only way Chad's abundance can be rationally grounded in truth is if he believes that the goods of the world will be around long enough for Chad to keep Chadding. But death comes for all, so this self-deception has a shelf life. And if the abundance is based on a self-deception, the loop will end at some point and it's really just an ego trip - which is a whole other problem in and of itself.

Secondly, I'm not like Chad. I know I am an eternal, though mortal, being. There is no amount of finite goodies in the world or universe which will fill me. I could literally experience every quantum of matter or energy in my life, because my life has no end. If my abundance stems from the fact that I know there's "plenty where that came from" and I know I have an eternity to fill with these finite goodies, then I must reject that abundance is true or reject that I am eternal. This is a setup for despair.

Enter abandonment. What Fr. Ciszek describes above is the same strength and happiness and generosity that Chad has, but it's from a more authentic and real frame - namely, God's. The only way for an eternal being to have "abundant life" is to be given that abundance from that frame. Reliance on the lower things will die out, and an authentic eternal being will eventually discover that.

This brings it all back to a common theme I've read on r/RPChristians, which is the (apparent or real) conflict between the autonomous, self-sufficient notion of mission in TRP and the more typically-espoused RPC notion of mission. TRP Chad is on his own mission, taking what he wants from a world full of goodies. RPC Chad is on God's mission, taking what God gives, in a world made for him simply to discover and undertake that "pure act," as Ciszek calls it.

Perhaps the Christian's abundance is identical to the Christian's mission, which is God's will. Maybe that's already been answered.