It is a gift

After 2 Corinthians 8:7-9 

Faith is a gift,

as are speech

and encouragement

and knowledge.

Faith is a gift,

as are zeal and love

and the love for others

and the love 

for each other.

You may not think

that the act of giving

is a gift, but so it is,

echoing the gift

of him who became

poor so we could

become rich.

 

Photograph by Tyler Lagalo via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

No Room in the Inn – What Inn? – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Frost warning, Christmastide – poem by Jody Lee Collins at Poetry & Made Things.

 

Christmas in a Foreign Land – Esther Greenfield at A Life Overseas. 

 

Let It Be – poem by Sandra Heska King at On Aging and Other Adventures.

 

Nostalgia, Longing, and Christmas Joy in “The Bleak Midwinter” – LuElla D’Amico at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“A Christmas Carol”: adapted by Talbot Hook, read by Andrew Benson Brown – Society of Classical Poets. 

What giving is

After 2 Corinthians 8:7-9

 

It’s not only money,

even if it is that. 

It’s more: to give

means to impart

one’s own money

and resources,

one’s time,

one’s attention,

a physical touch,

an emotional touch,

a hand or a shoulder,

to put an arm 

around a shoulder,

to come alongside

hurt and suffering. 

It’s more than

opening your wallet. 

Photograph by Tom Parsons via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Some Friday Readings

 

Cattleman – A Christmas Poem – Dan Tuton at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Incarnation – poem by Irene Zimmerman at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Embarrassed of My Embarrassment – Kraig Keck. 

 

The Feast of the Hungry – poem by Richard Tillinghast at New Criterion.

The Girl with the Red Balloons

You’re sitting in a hallway in a clinic or hospital, waiting your turn for chemotherapy. This is not a place you want to be; this is a place you never prepared yourself for. If you look at the other faces, you see the same pain, the same gauntness, the covered heads missing hair that stares back you when you have the courage to look in the mirror. 

And here comes a woman, looking and feeling as bad as you do, and she tells you she is here for the same reason you are, to get those treatments that convince you that the treatment is as bad as the disease.  

She gives you a red balloon. Or she hands one to your husband or wife. Or your three-year-old granddaughter. Or she offers a hug. And you realize she is just as physically weak as you are. 

After weeks of enduring chemotherapy and its associated treatments that were debilitating on a good day and horrible on the bad days, Margaret Feinberg has reached the end of her rope. She had been fighting back with joy, but she found herself in a place where she had no more joy to give. 

A Bible verse comes to mind. Acts 20:35. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” 

Jesus said it, although, as Feinberg points out, none of the Gospel accounts record it. It is St. Paul speaking, and he said he is quoting Jesus.  

It’s how Jesus lived his entire life. 

And in the depth of pain and despair, Feinberg asks herself a question. 

Am I supposed to give away joy, even when I have no joy to give? 

As she writes in Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears, “Flat broke in mind, body, and spirit, generosity was not a spiritual discipline I wanted to practice.” 
She wanted a passport out of pain, not a ticket to encouraging others. 

But then she realizes that the statement contains no qualifiers or exemptions. 

So she finally answers her question with red balloons. 

I suspect that a healthy person handing our red balloons in a cancer treatment center might be mildly appreciated, or perhaps possibly resented. What does a healthy person really know about the pit of chemotherapy? 

But Feinberg was one of them. She was going through it with them. She was feeling just as awful as they were. She identified with the pain. More to the point, she was living the pain.  

That’s how lives can be changed.

When you people know you understand, they respond.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “You’ve Got to Give This Away,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Mardi Gras Beads and Brennan Manning

When I was a child, my father owned a printing business in downtown New Orleans. His office was two longish blocks from St. Charles Avenue, which among other things was the main drag for all the parades on Mardi Gras Day. For the family, and a lot of friends and relatives, the office location was a perfect spot for enjoying the day. Watch a parade, walk back to the office, have access to bathroom facilities and food, go back to the parades – it was close to ideal.

I was something of a Mardi Gras “rat” – I loved the parades, I loved the crazy people dressed up in crazy costumes (or lack thereof), and I loved all the beads, trinkets and doubloons thrown from the floats. And I could scramble with the best of them. I’d usually arrive home with a big bag, or bags, of loot.

One year, our next-door neighbors (Yankees from Illinois) had friends visiting (also Yankees from Illinois). And the two children of the Yankees from Illinois did not how to scramble for Mardi Gras loot. The kids were devastated – they’d seen all the largesse flung from the floats, and had come away with two pairs of beads, courtesy of a lucky catch by their father.

I had had an unusually good haul. In other words, I was loaded – beads, doubloons, plastic toys, trinkets of every size and variety. It had been a good haul, one of my best, in fact.

At breakfast the morning after Mardi Gras, my mother mentioned the distraught visitors from next door. And then gave me a questioning look.

That afternoon, after school, I brought a bag of loot next door. (And by “loot” I mean what was usually thrown from floats – the bag might have had a monetary value of 39 cents.) I explained that we had heard about what had happened, and we had plenty to spare. (Yes, I was in 9-year-old agony at the thought of giving any of my loot up, but, well, it was making my mother happy.)

You would have thought by the visitors’ reactions that I had just brought in a haul from Tiffany’s. Let’s just say they were effusive in their thanks, so much so that I ended up embarrassed.

I learned something that day. Grace could take the form of cheap Mardi Gras trinkets. I had given up some of my priceless “treasure” and had experienced a blessing – how looks and feelings of disappointment could change into excitement and joy.

The Yankees had done nothing to deserve it, had not asked for it, and didn’t even know up about, until I showed up at the front door.

It was a bit like faith, and salvation. We do nothing to deserve it, and yet it comes, often unexpectedly.

“Our religion never begins with what we do for God,” Brennan Manning writes in The Furious Longing of God. “It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.”

No, a bag of Mardi Gras beads isn’t the same thing. And it probably wasn’t even the beads that were the real cause of the excitement, at least for me. I learned what a gift could represent.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, entitled “Giving,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.