“Long ago in ancient China, the king wanted to reward a loyal citizen. The king gave this simple man the right to mark out as much territory as he wished, and [said] that the area would be his. All he had to do was walk around, marking off the boundaries of his desired reward, and then return to the king to claim this land.

“The man set out, and on the first day he walked three miles. As he turned back to the palace in the far distance, he changed his mind. Perhaps he’d need a bit more, maybe just as far as the eye could see. A week later, he had finished walking this distance. But what if there was a drought or flood? Wouldn’t it be better to mark out enough land for farming and fishing, and maybe a woods for hunting?

“It took him a year to complete all these goals. As he set off to return to the palace and complete the circle, he thought about his children. Would this be enough to pass on to them for 10 generations? Maybe they should have access to the ocean, in case they wanted to become shipping merchants. He walked further. By now he was quite tired, but on he went, inspired by the knowledge that each step was increasing his holdings.

“Ten years later, he began his journey back, an old and tired man. Just as he entered the palace, he dropped dead. He never realized the ambitions he had continually adjusted upward. His children had no land. He never enjoyed even a fraction of the good life he sought because of his bondage to ‘never enough.’”

Harvard Business School professors Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson, open their new book with this story. Entitled Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life, they do the unusual and helpful thing of asking the right questions. What is success? What is the good life? How would you know you have achieved it? When is enough, enough? What is just enough? [John Wiley & Sons, 2004, pp. vii-viii.]

Long ago, the compiler of the Proverbs included the curious words we just read that ask these same questions in another and funnier form. The leech has two daughters, he begins. “Give, give,” they cry. Now, I have two daughters, too. And “Give, give” is a cry I know, don’t you know?! The question I have, though, is, does having two daughters that cry give, give make me a leech?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word leech comes from an old medical practice still used in some places today. A surgeon puts blood-sucking wormy creatures on a wound to control the bleeding. Originally the doctor was called a leech for doing that; later the worms came to be known as leeches; and from that anyone who seems a craven parasite that can’t get enough and just hangs on to the end sucking the last of life out of someone or something is called a leech. Not a complimentary word, leech—one of those onomatopoeia sounds-like-what-it-is things. LEECH!

So I guess part of the proverbial truth that we don’t like to see is that daughters get this way because they are like their mothers. Sorry, I meant parents. Children learn from their parents’ way of looking at the world. If they see in their parents an insatiable appetite for more, better and different, they will suffer the consumer impulse if not inherit the shopping gene. And who among us is not susceptible to the give, give impulse that is really about get, get?

Three things are never satisfied; four never say, “Enough.” … But it’s really five, isn’t it? We are right there with the other four. Sheol is the place of the dead in Hebrew thinking. It’s the invisible underworld of the dead. It’s not hell; it’s just a way of talking about the netherworld of those who continue to exist in our memory but not in the flesh. It’s the graveyard. No matter how many people die, the grave is never satisfied. It always wants more.

A barren womb also cries give, give because it so desperately wants to welcome a child into its secret warmth. It cannot get enough contribution to that goal until it is satisfied with life. But since it is barren, it will never have enough. It is insatiable. And if any of you has ever struggled with infertility in your quest to have a child, you know this is no metaphor. The cry give, give comes joined with tears.

The thirsty earth, on the other hand, has no water stored in its ducts to shed tears when crying give, give. If you’ve ever lived though a drought, you know that it seems like you could open a dam on the dirt and the water would disappear almost as fast as it hit. And finally, fire. A raging fire craves oxygen and wood for fuel in order to keep up its hot flame and consuming passion.

Consuming passion. That is the point of all four mentioned; five if you count us, as you are supposed to. Consumption. We need to have more, better and different without the promise of ever having enough. But do we really want to have enough? Don’t we really enjoy the prospect of our next buy? The next sale that convinces us we got a good deal on our 27th pair of shoes? What would happen if we ever had enough?

Now, the impulse for better and different is not itself the problem unless and until you join it to the unceasing hunger for more. Then it gets consuming.

Every time I go to Europe I realize how American is my desire for better and different. We always try to make a better mousetrap. A virtue is a vice in its extreme. We always want the newest model of everything. But even if it is better and different, it may be the “more” that makes it attractive. A few years ago a few golfing friends and I were in Lahinch, Ireland. Wonderful golf course there. We stayed in a brand-new inn. Two things struck me odd: radiators and sinks. Hasn’t anyone told the Irish about central heating? Do they just like the sound of a radiator clanking in the middle of the night? And what about those sinks? Don’t they travel at all? Don’t they know you can get one faucet that will give you hot and cold water mixed to your desired temperature instead of having tow spouts and that little rubber plug with the chain on it in the basin to mix the water? Come on. It’s one thing to keep the old ones in good repair, but when you are building new stuff and you still want old stuff, well, isn’t that a little stuffy?

Maybe there’s something deeper in them that we could learn from. Maybe less is more, sometimes. Maybe different is only different and not always better. Maybe Europeans are content in ways we are not allowed to be as Americans, because we live on the continent of discontent.

In his book Still Following Christ in a Consumer Culture: The Spirituality of Cultural Resistance, John Kavanaugh says of some advertisers that are purveyors of discontent: This is their relentless message which assaults the self-worth and perceptions of millions: your hair is too long, your hair is too short, your skin is too light or too dark, your smells are noxious, you are too fat, too thin, too blemished, you must have a training bra in the fifth grade or you will have no friends, your breasts are too large or frightfully small, you can stop traffic in a Maidenform bra, you will be frigid or impotent if you do not use Hai Karate or Musk. [Rev. ed., Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991, p.36.] Well, I’m not sure about that last part. The Hai Karate cologne might help your alone time. But you get the idea. All of this feeds on self-loathing. We don’t think we are well made the way we are. We don’t think we have enough to live on happily. We need more, better and different. And there is always someone ready to sell it to us, even if that means selling us out.

How radically different and better is the message from St. Paul to the Philippians! I have learned to be content with whatever I have. Really? Can that be a good thing? I mean, our economy would grind to a halt if people really learned that.

Remember the wisdom of our leaders right after 9/11? What was the patriotic thing to do? Grieve? Yes, of course. Pray? Absolutely. Go after Osama? You bet. Care for one another? Certainly. And in some ways, we were never more neighborly or kind toward one another than in those days just after the terrorist attacks. But some of that was undermined by another declared patriotic duty: SHOP. Go back to the malls and buy, buy, buy. Remember? One way to beat the terrorists is to keep the economy growing. So instead of calling on Americans to seek contentment in spiritual ways, instead of asking us all to pull together and sacrifice the way we did after Pearl Harbor, we are to shop while our soldiers make all the sacrifices. We should have been asked to expect less as shareholders, to resist the rush to lay off workers until things settled down, but we assumed we would all remain committed to more, better and different. And we were. People started selling their stocks, fearing losses. We made sure we protected ourselves. So companies laid off thousands of workers, making matters worse. Is that contentment, or is that a nation of leeches with two daughters that cry, Give, give and cannot say Enough.

What is the answer, then? I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Only spiritual power at work in us is capable of defeating this consumerist mentality. We sometimes use this verse out of context. I remember playing football and claiming this verse as a performance insurance. Somehow Christ would be my secret weapon for success—all things, right? My pagan opponents would be no matches; especially if I could line up my teammates around this verse. But the verse means all things in the sense of all things, all states of being in relation to things: from poverty to wealth, from hunger to fullness, from need to plenty. Christ’s power is a secret weapon—not to give us competitive advantage over others, but to give us competitive advantage over our never-ending cravings for more, better and different.

The mythological character Tantalus  was the son of   Zeus and king of Sipylos. He was uniquely favored among mortals since he was invited to share the food of the gods. However, he abused the guest-host relationship and was punished by being tantalized with hunger and thirst in Tartarus. He was immersed up to his neck in water, but when he bent to drink, it all drained away. Luscious fruit hung on trees above him, but when he reached for it, the winds blew the branches beyond his reach.

The difference between the tragic Tantalus and the victorious Paul is the power of Christ. Accessing that power through prayer, and nurturing it though the encouragement of family and church, leads us down the path of greatest resistance to all that tantalizes us. It’s also the way of greatest grace that leads to the good life we seek, which is found not in more, better and different but in just enough.