Quote of the Day: Roy L. Smith on Daily Inspiration

Notice he says “unwillingness” rather than “inability.” Inability would let us blame logistics, weather, or bad luck, impersonal forces with no moral author. Unwillingness indicts the human will. It suggests that the bottleneck isn’t outside us; it’s in us. And it sharpens the claim that follows: “The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.”

That distinction matters because modern life is loud with proof of production. We can grow food at astonishing scale, move goods across oceans overnight, and turn research into life-saving medicine with breathtaking speed. The shelves are stocked; the data is abundant; the capacity is there. Yet hunger persists, housing remains precarious, and basic care is rationed by zip code and bank balance.

Smith’s line refuses to let “progress” be measured only in output. A society can be technologically sophisticated and morally underdeveloped at the same time. The problem isn’t simply that some people have too little; it’s that systems are built to protect surpluses as status, through hoarding, waste, and gatekeeping, while calling scarcity “inevitable.” Sharing, in this sense, isn’t sentimental charity. It is a form of civic architecture: rules, incentives, and habits that treat dignity as non-negotiable humanity.

As an American minister and writer, Roy L. Smith spent a career translating faith into public responsibility, sermons and essays that pressed hope into the hard work of neighborliness.

And on this date in history, November 30, 1872 marked the first international soccer match, England vs. Scotland, an early reminder that rules can turn rivalry into shared play. The same is true for resources: if we want abundance to become wellbeing, we’ll need the courage to redesign what we reward and the discipline to practice leadership where it’s hardest, at the point of sharing.