Remember how I posted at the end of December about my difficulty getting motivated to tithe from my husband's bonus? And then the next week I posted about how he had been offered a job and we'd received unexpected money in the mail? I have been thinking for a while now about telling the rest of the story, or at least more of the story (since it may not be over yet), but two things have been holding me back.
One is the voice of my mother, saying Nice People Don't Talk About Money; the second is Jesus' admonition not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing when it comes to almsgiving. (One would think that by age 34 I would be putting Jesus' voice ahead of my mother's; maybe I'll get there in another five years.) Not only are both my hands in the know, they're collaborating to type it up and post it on the web. But since my aim here is to say that God's providence has surpassed my wildest imaginings, and not to pat myself on the back for a decision made with embarrassing reluctance, I'm going to plow ahead anyway.
In the first two weeks after I mailed those checks, we found out that we would be getting back almost exactly what we had given away, all of it from unexpected sources. (An example: my husband's final paycheck from his city job credited him with way more vacation than either of us thought he had coming.) I was still thinking about taxes, though.
The job my husband just left pushed us into a higher tax bracket for the first time. I had no idea what our tax liability for the year would be, or how it would correspond to what had been withheld over the course of the year. When I wrote in January that I would cheerfully pay higher taxes if it meant better health care for the poor, I thought to myself, "That is an invitation for Uncle Sam to send you a big bill." I was determined to pay it cheerfully, if that's what it came down to, because render unto Caesar &c. But I wondered how big a bite it would be.
When the W2 came I sat down quickly with a pencil and paper. I was stunned to find that we had a substantial refund coming -- a refund, coincidentally, almost exactly equal to the total of those checks I wrote with such hesitation.
Now I am not preaching the prosperity gospel here, not saying that you should tithe because God will give you back twice as much as you gave away. But this experience has taken me by surprise.
"You can't out-give God" is a truism among evangelicals. I've heard it over and over, and I always nodded my head vaguely and thought about all the intangible blessings I had been given. But I never imagined, when I dropped those envelopes in the mail at the end of December, what the next month would bring financially.
The idea of God blessing Christians materially is not a popular one. Some of it is justifiable concern about unethical preachers who say, "Send me your money and God will pay you back"; some of it is an appropriate rejection of materialism. But I think, too, that some of it comes from the misplaced feeling that praying about money is crass, that we should be praying for world peace instead. In my freshman year of college I used to go to a Vineyard church occasionally and once I invited a friend, who had grown up in the same mainline Protestant denomination that I had, to come along. When we left, there was an uneasy silence. I asked him what he thought, and he blurted out, "I hope you're not going there very often, Jamie. The pastor said you could pray for a car and God would find you one! It seems like some kind of cult to me."
But I was thinking in the shower yesterday that Christians serve a God whose dying words were "I thirst." I have seen spiritual explanations of those words -- that Jesus was thirsting for souls, thirsting for righteousness in the world -- but I think there is beauty too in the plain meaning of them. To live in a physical world, with a physical body, is to have physical needs. In the service of a Lord whose life began and ended amid privation, we need not be afraid to make those needs known.
The end of this post ought to be something like: "And so I will never balk at giving again, because I have seen the providence of God." Unfortunately, I am finding that it still takes discipline to get those checks written, and that it takes yet more discipline to let go of my worries about money. It's an expensive series of undertakings, this business of buying a house and fixing a kitchen, moving a family and having a baby. In December I wrote about the Israelites crossing the Jordan; I didn't realize that I would continue to think, "Yeah, we're walking on dry ground right now, but I bet it gets pretty muddy over in that patch I can't see."
When my children are dawdling and grumbling instead of listening, I sometimes sing to them, to the tune of the Wisconsin fight song: "Prompt and cheerful! Prompt and cheerful! That's the way to be!" (If they grow up to like Big Ten football, a predilection they will not have inherited from their mother, they will wonder why they are overcome by the urge to throw things at the screen whenever the Badger marching band begins to play "On Wisconsin.") Maybe, in those moments when I am tempted to say, "I'll just write this check next month, when I can see the big picture a little more clearly," I should ask them to sing to me instead.
So: the three disciplines of Lent are fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Last week: Bad At Fasting. This week: Almsgiving -- The Reluctant Approach. Tune in next week for: Prayer? Can't We Stop Talking About These Things I Am Bad At And Trade Fondue Recipes Instead? But I guess the point of Lent is that we take these weeks and work on it, that we keep doing it stiffly until it becomes natural.
I wanted to write about this experience in part because I heard from several people who shared my fears about giving. I don't know what the future holds for us; I only know that I am still surprised by what followed when I took the plunge. You can't out-give God, they say. But I tell you this: a person has to wonder what might happen if she tried.
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