Moyer's hour long offering traced the evolution of this familiar hymn from the time of its writing to the present day. Amazing Grace flowed out of the pen, and out of the broken heart of a man who had been the captain of a slave ship. One day John Newton was brought to his knees by the realization that even while he was working to enslave others that God was working to free him. John left his livelihood, but discovered his life. The hymn is his anthem to the transformation that God can enkindle in anyone. In time Newton's hymn became an anthem of the American civil rights movement and a song of solidarity in the fight against apartheid in Africa.

There were many good things I could tell you about about Moyer's presentation, but I want to focus on one interview tucked into the middle of the program. Bill Moyers was speaking to a black deacon and song leader from a Baptist church in the rural south. The man was in his nineties. Mr. Moyers sat in the small, clean, simple space of the deaconšs kitchen and asked how life looked from where the deacon sat. There was a pause. Then ninety years of faithful living were condensed into two simple statements.

"I have been very lucky," this wise and dignified man replied, "I haven't had too much and I haven't had too little." Moyers pressed the deacon a little to discover what this enigmatic statement meant. "Both are distractions," the deacon replied.

It is true. The more we have, the more time it takes to manage all of it. But if we don't have enough we exhaust all our personal energy and all the available daylight just trying to stay warm, dry and fed.

The lessons today speak of this. Deuteronomy warns of the distractions that await in a land of plenty. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied complacency when the table is full of good things and everything we need appears to be close at hand. It is easy to begin to worship our own efforts or to fall in love with the fruits of our labor rather than remembering the one who made it all.

We do not supply our own needs.