Learning to Be Helped: Accepting Generosity from Others

When I was in the first year of my marriage, my husband lost his job. My best friend, herself still a college student and engaged to be married, paid our rent one month. She gave me a check for the exact amount in a card that read.

“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”  Matthew 7:11

While I knew it to be true, her act of generosity helped me to remember. Last week I got an anonymous card in the mail loaded with gift cards to a local grocery store, enough to buy groceries for my kids for the next few weeks. I felt both incredibly grateful and deeply unworthy at the same time.

It can be a challenge to accept help. American culture teaches us to be independent, sometimes almost to a fault. We don’t like being obligated to others, and letting others help us might mean expectations in return.

I love giving to others. Since I was a kid I enjoyed finding the perfect gift for someone, even if that someone was a child in poverty or one with a parent in prison, in my own neighborhood or across the globe.

As it child, receiving gifts was just as easy. But it got harder as an adult. Children, in their ego-centric natures, don’t always consider the effort behind the gift. They can be taught gratitude, but they don’t usually question the motive of the giver.

But there will be times, I’m living in one right now, when we will experience the generosity of others that meets a need and not just relays a kindness. When I receive generosity during a time of need, it highlights what appears to be a weakness. I further feel the weight of my need and it makes me feel all the more powerless.

But, this is in itself important. Because, as I often say, control is an illusion. I may have money and stability today, and tomorrow it could be gone. Any material advantage or privilege can be lost, and underneath it all I am worth no more or less than the homeless man down the street or the single mother on welfare. We are all God’s children, and we all desperately need his help, some of us are just more aware of it than others.

Accept help when it is offered, and keep no record, except to remember what it is like to be on the receiving end. Let it motive you and how you extend generosity to others with kindness and dignity.

Next – Embrace Extravagance: Pursuing Uncommon Giving