Enough: The Solution for the Relentless Pursuit of More

The little girl was two years old. Her plate was full. She had more food in front of her than she could possibly finish. And her little arm was stretched as far as it could reach, toward her brother's plate.

Of course, his plate had the same exact food.

We laugh, because it's absurd, and because every adult recognizes it. The little girl just stares back. She doesn't understand what's funny. Her entire focus is on what she does not have. A full plate in front of her, and her whole little body straining toward something else.

But in one respect, if we’re honest, that’s a picture of ourselves that is not quite so funny.

Somewhere between the age of two and adulthood, I became that child, just with better manners and a longer reach. I reached for more, but the threshold kept moving. I would get what I thought I needed, feel relief for a moment, but find myself reaching again before the feeling had time to settle.

We are occupied with the pursuit of enough, but seemingly cursed with the craving for more. Why does enough always feel just out of reach, no matter how much we have?

The Problem

Try to define “enough.”

Talk to someone who has struggled financially, and they will tell you that enough is just a little further ahead — one raise, one year of savings, one debt paid off. Talk to someone who has already achieved financial stability, and you will find it is one more acquisition, one more big deal, or one more decimal point ahead. The threshold moved. What they needed last year isn’t what they need now. In fact, when they hit their last target, the feeling of sufficiency arrived briefly and then faded like a mist, leaving behind a new number, a new goal to reach.

And don’t assume this is a problem confined to the extremes — the person who doesn’t have enough, or the person who can never get enough. They are both running the same alarm. The people I know who are most consumed by the pursuit of enough are not particularly materialistic. What they are is anxious. There is something underneath the surface of their life that the monthly bills and the mergers are trying to quiet. But it doesn’t work. They get what they reached for, but the alarm keeps running.

For some people, the alarm runs at a low-grade urgency and usually begins with “what if...” For others, it is more like background noise that sounds like “if I could only...” Few people I have met have figured out how to turn it off entirely.

People look for the answer to “enough” in the usual places. Budget differently. Want less. Practice gratitude. These are not bad suggestions. They simply do not reach the wire that’s triggering the alarm.

I stumbled on the answer to this problem when I wasn’t expecting it. And at first, I didn’t understand what I was actually looking at.

An Unusual Answer

I was reading Psalm 131, a tight little Hebrew poem that is only three verses long. I read it, and then I read it again.

It was verse 2 that grabbed my attention.

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a weaned child with its mother;

like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD

from this time forth and forevermore.

David describes his soul as a weaned child with its mother. Frequently, through the Old Testament, God’s affection for Israel has been described in the intimate terms of a mother and her nursing infant. It’s a precious image. But here the soul of the psalmist is portrayed as a child who has already been weaned.

And yet the child, David’s soul, is still with the mother. Not being fed in that moment. Not receiving anything, per se. Just present, and at rest.

Note how David describes his condition. He is calm. He is quiet. Totally at rest.

I was captured by that imagery. Although I had not turned to this passage specifically as a meditation for man’s obsession with having enough, I thought, “Here is a soul whose alarm has gone quiet.”

If I could just get to where David was. If we all could reach that point.

But think for a moment about what happens in the relationship between mother and infant when the child is weaned. Adjustments are necessary. Tasting table food for the first time. Learning that the comfort of the mother’s arms does not require the provision of her breasts.

Weaning is necessary for the baby’s maturity. And calm and peace are produced not by provision, but by relationship.

The Definition

So how did David reach this place of calm and quiet? The answer is in verse 3.

David invites those who want the condition he described in verse 2 to “hope in the LORD.”

The word translated “hope” is the Hebrew word yachal. It should not be confused with optimism or wishful thinking. Nor is it the vague confidence that things will probably work out.

According to the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, this hope is “the idea of tarrying and confident expectation, trust” (Harris, Archer, and Waltke, entry 859). This hope is grounded in the established character of the One being waited on. Yachal is not about waiting for a change in circumstance. It waits on a Person. It says: I am waiting on the LORD because He is the kind of God worth waiting on.

At first, I thought David might be prescribing a formula in verse 3. As if to say, “Try harder to hope, and your soul will be quieted.” But that’s not what is happening in Psalm 131. He is describing what is already true of his settled soul — this is what a soul looks like when one trusts in the Lord. This is what it looks like to be weaned.

“Hope in the LORD” is not the instruction that produces the condition of peace. Hope is the theological name for what the weaned child feels like from the inside.

The rest David describes is a product of a relationship that has become reliable enough to rest in. His soul is at peace because he finally found enough. It was in a Person. It was in God.

And to my surprise, I discovered that a developmental psychology experiment from decades ago pointed to the same conclusion from a very different perspective.

The Irony

In the 1970s, a developmental psychologist named Mary Ainsworth conducted a series of experiments called the Strange Situation. She briefly separated infants from their caregivers, then observed what happened at reunion. Her findings gave rise to what many of us know as attachment theory.

Ainsworth identified three specific patterns. Read them slowly.

Some children are securely attached to their caregiver. Consistency in the caregiver is the key to secure attachment. As long as the parent responded consistently to the child’s needs, it provided the baby with a sense of security. When this kind of infant becomes an adult, this person can hold uncertainty about money, status, and security without being emotionally destabilized — all because their security in childhood was rooted in a consistent relationship.

Other children are anxiously attached because their caregiver was inconsistent — sometimes present, sometimes not. As an adult, this person experiences a perpetually shifting threshold of “enough.” They reach their goals, and then the alarm restarts almost immediately. This is not greed. It is anxiousness — they never learned that reliable security exists.

And then some children are avoidantly attached to their caregiver. In this case, the caregiver was consistently unresponsive. For the protection of their own emotions, this child builds a system of self-sufficiency and attempts to avoid their need entirely. They bury their longing for a response. As an adult, they suppress any longing so thoroughly that they can’t find it. The alarm is still running. They’ve just learned to ignore it.

What does this have to do with David’s psalm and his weaned soul? Everything.

Security is a relational condition, not a material one. Every human is designed with a need to attach. To their parents, of course. But more importantly, we were designed to attach upward — with God Himself.

The Conclusion

Perhaps you recognize yourself in one of these descriptions — the threshold that keeps moving, the alarm that never quiets, or the self-sufficiency that is disguised as real peace. If so, the cure for your anxious heart is not more resources. The enough problem has always been a relational one.

We were designed to attach upward. Real peace is not found in material accumulation. It is found in hope in the One who consistently responds and never fails. God is your “enough.”

Let me say it like this. If your alarm keeps going off, realize that you were not created to always be full. You were created to be securely attached — and your Creator will never let go.