> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Abundance - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/abundance/ - Published: 2026-04-19T13:29:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-06T19:52:49.000Z - Description: The pond didn't break the weir board. The abundance did. All that water, pressing outward the way water does, following the only instruction it has ever been given. - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach - Tags: ep-14 The spillway lost one of its weir boards a few weeks ago. It had been running harder than I had seen it run in years — all of it, the snowmelt, the April rains, weeks of accumulation moving through the watershed at once — and apparently the boards became a suggestion. My colleague Doug noticed the waterline first: a retreating edge, more visible rocks, a little more mud on the church side than there should be. The pond was emptying itself. Not dramatically, not all at once — but steadily, persistently, in the direction it has always wanted to go. Every morning since, on my way to work, I stop and check it. The engineering firm we are working with is moving faster now on the weir rebuild. The pond needs to be held. We are not in the business of losing it entirely, and there is nothing romantic about an empty pond bed full of mud in June. Stewardship is real, and it requires us sometimes to slow what wants to run. But every morning the spillway teaches me the same thing: Abundance flows. If we let it. Even sometimes when we don't. The pond didn't break the weir board. The abundance did. All that water, pressing outward the way water does, following the only instruction it has ever been given — toward the harbor, toward the Sound, toward the ocean — simply exceeded what we had built to contain it. The pond was not misbehaving. It was being itself, completely. There is a word for this in the Christian tradition: Kenosis. Self-emptying. It comes from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, where Paul writes that Christ "emptied himself,” poured himself out, gave himself away, let go of what he might have kept. Kenosis is one of the central mysteries of the faith and one of the least preached, perhaps because it is the most spiritually demanding. To give not from surplus but from substance. To flow outward not because you have extra but because outward is the direction of love. The Christian tradition has always held that creation bears the imprint of its creator. And what God is, God pours into what God makes — flourishing, abundant, joyful, creative, redemptive, rising. The pond doesn't empty itself because it has heard the gospel. It empties itself because it was made by a God who empties, and that nature went all the way down into the water and the mud and the spillway. The pond is trying to follow Jesus in the only way it knows: giving itself to something larger, drawn by gravity and desire. It doesn't deliberate or count the cost. The spillway is not a metaphor. It is the thing itself. And that water lands somewhere. It flows from this spillway into Cold Spring Harbor, where baymen have been hand-raking oysters and clams for generations. Eighty or more independent harvesters working the same estuary our pond feeds into, in all weather, by hand. What happens at our spillway flows downstream to their livelihood. The health of our water is the health of their work. And the oysters themselves — each one filtering fifty gallons of water a day, quietly, without thinking about it, participating in the watershed's healing the way the pond participates in it. The oysters are doing the same thing the spillway does: Receiving what arrives. Giving back something clean. The pond empties itself toward the harbor, and the harbor gives back life. This is what the economy of abundance looks like when it reaches all the way down. We will rebuild the weir. We should. The pond in its fullness sustains more life than an empty basin ever could, and stewardship is its own form of love. But I find myself grateful these past weeks for the board that has been washed out. For the daily reminder that what we are managing has its own deep instinct, older than our plans, pressing always outward toward the harbor, toward the Sound, toward whatever comes next. **A Prayer:** God of the outflowing water, who poured yourself into flesh and then into death and then into the endless life that followed. Teach us the kenosis the pond already knows. We confess how easily we mistake accumulation for abundance, how readily we mistake what contains us for what sustains us. Loosen what we have built to contain ourselves. Let what has been gathering in us find its way to you. Through Christ, who emptied himself not despite being God but because of it, and who is the spillway through whom all things flow toward you. Amen.