Schooled in Generosity

“I couldn’t wait to get home to get a haircut,” my fiancé, David, said. He was on spring break from the Christian college he attended. Forty years ago, many Christian schools’ dress code required male students to keep their hair trimmed above their ears and off their collar, and his school was no exception. 

David launched into a snip-by-snip description of his roommate’s attempt to trim the back of his hair with a dull pair of scissors. “I didn’t trust him to cut the hair around my ears,” he said, “so I covered each ear with the hairspray cap and sprayed the hair in place. When I finished, a forty-mile-an-hour-wind couldn’t move it.” 

“Why didn’t you just get a haircut?” I asked. Surely there’s a barber shop near campus.

“I was broke,” he said. “I had money when I went back to school, but a missionary spoke during chapel service. I was blown away by his testimony and donated everything in my wallet to his ministry.”

I was a new believer then, and apparently a selfish one. At least, I was still learning about generosity. I couldn’t imagine giving away all my money to anyone, not even a missionary. If I’d heard that speaker, I’d have calculated my expenses for the month, added a little cushion for the unexpected, then given what was left—maybe. 

While God never calls us to be reckless and give away money we owe others or that our family needs to survive, He does invite us to give sacrificially. Paul commended the Macedonian believers for giving “according to their ability and even beyond it” (2 Corinthians 8:11). Although they were poverty-stricken, they “earnestly pleaded . . . for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints” (v. 4).

I had a lot to learn about generosity.

In recent years, God has used my six-year-old granddaughter, Caroline, to demonstrate the spirit of lavish generosity. Whenever I visit her or she visits me, we seldom part without her pulling me aside with a mysterious smile. 

“Gigi,” she says, “I have something for you.” Then she reaches into her pocket or her treasure box and pulls out a sparkly rock, a cupcake-shaped eraser, or a glass marble. “This is for you.” 

Her love gifts line a shelf in my kitchen and stand as irrefutable evidence of how deep love overflows into rich generosity.

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of sacrificial giving I’ve ever witnessed happened during a mission trip to Mexico. There our team met a single mom and her five children. Marta and her kids lived with her mother, Lupita, in a two-room cinder block house on the outskirts of town. 

We’d planned to take Marta’s children for a morning outing to give her and her mother a break and to treat the kids. They’d never been to McDonalds, and we knew they’d enjoy a Happy Meal and a chance to play in the play place.

As we rounded the corner of the dirt road that led to their house, we saw them—standing by the roadside dressed in their Sunday best. “They’ve been out there for more than an hour,” Lupita said through our translator. “They’re so excited.” 

The children swarmed our kids as soon as we stepped from our vehicles. With wide grins and sparkling eyes, they presented each child with a carefully washed piece of fruit wrapped in a napkin. 

“Para ti,” they said. “For you.”

Our kids were old enough to recognize poverty. In a country where the average worker earns twelve dollars a day, they knew these children weren’t giving out of their abundance.

“Mommy,” my daughter whispered to me, her eyes wide. “What if this is all they had for breakfast?” I understood her hesitation. I felt it too.

“Take it,” I urged. “They want to share. It makes them happy.” One glance at their faces confirmed my words. Patti, a dark-eyed five-year-old with a missing front tooth and shiny braids, smiled shyly, then wrapped her arms around my daughter and squeezed hard.

“They’re the poorest family in the church,” our missionary friends told us later, “but they’re the most giving.” 

Later that night, I held my daughter as she wept. “We have so much, and they have so little,” she said between hiccupy sobs. “Why would they want to give it away?” 

First John 4:19 tells us, “We love because he first loved us.” We give because He first gave to us, too. James 1:17 reminds us, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.”  

As believers, we give not to receive, but because of what we’ve already received. Gratitude for the life in our bodies, the breath in our lungs, and the salvation of our souls wells up in us and splashes over in generosity onto everyone we encounter. 

Romans 8:32 captures the extravagance of God’s love and forms the basis for why we give: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

In the face of such lavish generosity, how can we help but open our own hearts and hands?

The Lord has brought me a long way since my husband’s first shocking display of generosity. Under God’s patient teaching and through the example of others, my selfish heart is becoming ever more grateful—and more generous.

I want to be like David. 

And Caroline.

And Patti.

And God.

–Written by Lori Hatcher. Used by permission from the author. Click here to connect with Lori.