When the Wallet Empties

Thin seasons and the wider vocabulary of provision

M working in the studio that came along with my ‘free’ stay in Bavaria for the whole summer.

There is a spell on the modern mind.

It repeats one line:
If you just had more money, everything would relax.

Money is useful. I enjoy a flush account. It buys time and removes friction.

But it is a narrow pipe to force all provision through.

We have trained ourselves to believe currency is the only delivery system life is allowed to use. As if existence were a vending machine and the only acceptable coin were cash. Insert card. Select comfort.

So people harness themselves to work they tolerate or quietly resent because they cannot imagine another configuration. The imagination has thinned. It scrolls. It binges. It dulls.

Meanwhile something older waits.

I have been self-employed my entire adult life. I have raised six children on unpredictable income. I have lived under a silver maple on Fuller Avenue in Grand Rapids with boxes of clothes appearing anonymously on our porch. My kids tore into them like treasure chests. No invoice. Just circulation.

In Bavaria, an 80-year-old woman running an Airbnb insisted I stay for free after a year of shared meals and long conversations. The first year I paid. The second year I was a guest.

I have watched this pattern repeat for decades.

When the wallet empties, other channels appear.

Rooms open.
Meals arrive.
Friendships turn into shelter.

Not fantasy. Not irresponsibility. Pattern.

I am not romanticizing scarcity. I prefer a healthy bank balance. But I have learned that money is only one language of provision.

When the numbers shrink, the senses sharpen.

Boredom without a screen becomes ignition.
Loneliness becomes a corridor.
Silence becomes a workshop.

In those stripped-down seasons, resourcefulness wakes up. Relational intelligence deepens. You begin to see how much of life flows outside the marketplace.

Most people never stay long enough to discover this. They anesthetize the discomfort. Scroll. Stream. Sedate.

But if you stay, if you let the thinness do its work, something expands.

You begin to live inside story again instead of subscription.
You begin to experience provision that does not show up on a spreadsheet.

Money is cool. Earn it. Steward it.

Just don’t reduce your imagination to it.

Provision has a wider vocabulary than currency.

And the empty-wallet season might not be a failure state.

It might be the doorway.