It wasn’t really much of a choice. They could either leap off a cliff and risk losing their lives or be captured or killed by the posse that had cornered them. Knowing they had nothing to lose, they took the impossible leap, landed in a river, and lived to see another day.

This was a scene from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a fictionalized account of the experiences of two notorious outlaws from the American West in the late 1800s. In the movie, the pair’s desperate leap was a measure of their determination to avoid capture at any cost, illustrating the kind of attitude many people think of when they hear someone say that they “have nothing to lose.” 

But there’s another way to think about having nothing to lose that has nothing to do with loss or risk. And it’s a state of thought we would all want to acquire if we understood its eternal blessings. It is based on the fact that everything we need is always available to every one of us in God’s inexhaustible abundance.