Tuesday, December 20, 2016

How God Taught me To Give part 1


It’s Christmas Time! A time of gift exchanges,  reflection and catching up with old friends!


The past decade, as I entered adulthood in my late teens, I kept meeting inspiring people. People who were called full-time, missionaries, community workers, social workers, random people I met and spoke to, family members, colleagues, classmates, bosses, all kinds of people. They gave their life to various works, to various causes.

But the one thing that threaded my inspiration of them were their tireless generousity. Not all were Christian. In fact, some of my most generous friends are non-believers.

I wondered, what is it about their generousity that elicits inspiration? Why is selflessness so fantastically alluring? What differentiates Christian generousity from non-Christian generousity? Should it, or must it differ? I wanted to emulate that giving spirt and wanted to learn how to give.

The primary way God taught me to give was by example from family, people, from churches, from people I met, books I read the past decade since I was 18. The hodgepodge of generous stories taught me about the beauty of generousity and in turn taught, influenced, modelled and even mentored me no matter how long or how brief the interaction was… Here’s my tribute to the many teachers of generousity in my life:

Family
My mum’s family were 3rd generation Hainanese naturalized immigrants and her siblings are the Baby Boomer Generation, who grew up in 50s-60s Post-war Singapore. Since a child I was always amused, sometimes intrigued by how my mum and her numerous siblings exchange gifts almost on a weekly basis. Although my mum is the only believer in the family, I caught a glimpse of what Romans 12:10 looks like: “10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honour.” This pattern was started by my late Grandma and interestingly, my sisters has also adapted my mum’s extravagant generousity despite their own struggles and various ailments. My cousins always remember my mum as the only aunt who gives and accepts them despite their life-choices.

Her giving was not confined to gifts but she used gifts as a tool to love.

If indeed our Christian family is indeed our true spiritual family, should we not live this lifestyle of “loving affectionately, and outdoing one another in showing honour” to those who are siblings in the faith? It must be our lifestyle.

Friends / People
I remember friends who painstakingly crafted, created random gifts for friends with such thoughtfulness and personalization, and I wonder why’d they do it? Many shares that it was a culture they’ve known all their lives. Their family elders modelled thoughtfulness and generousity to them as children and now they are doing so consistently.

I remember S, a very strong lady, who managed to get diverse gifts for each person at one evangelistic Christmas gathering, I asked her how she managed to get such a diverse and even personalized gift for the close to 100 participants that night. I was amazed as the gifts were not cheap! She told me each personalized gift was a prayer, but the gift buying did not happen just during the Christmas season, but she took time to buy various items throughout the year.

A consistent lifestyle it was, to be generous.

I remember my ex-colleagues of social workers, who were generous even when it hurts.
The team gave, loved, treated each other, cooked for each on such a regular basis it was a beautiful culture. The supervisors and senior management even remembered our birthdays individually and gave us good gifts on our birthdays. I cannot comprehend giving such love to 100 staff on such a regular basis. This, was on top of our daily work then, that involved being generous to our clients day by day. They went the extra mile for clients, getting them supplies from their own pocket, and sometimes after all these extra miles to only receive complaints when some clients get unhinged in stressful times. Yet they still go on.

I remember Mdm D, a Cambodian non-believer, who together with her husband, worked hard to grow their business, with the sole aim of helping her fellow countrymen. She provides numerous jobs, and even homes for her farm workers to raise their family. Being our host in Cambodia, she regularly stopped the bus to feed and clothe random beggars on the street. It was a lifestyle of generousity.

These people I met showed me the beauty of generousity and more importantly, how very possible it was to integrate generousity into our lives.


Churches and Christian Organisations
Peers, people and friends inspires us with individual generousity and thoughtful effort. But when a church or Christian organization do it corporately as a representative of Christ, the beauty is full.

I remember a church in Bangkok, Thailand, who hosted us Singaporeans as we jointly ran a camp for youths and young adults.

The Thai and Singaporean teams were almost the same age, young urban working adults in our mid twenties. Yet here were a team of our peers who modelled for us hospitality. Many took many days of leave and rented vans to drive us around. The lay pastor, a lady, let us stay in her home and gave us sufficient space to rest. Food being important to us South-East Asians, when they fed us, they fed us abundantly.  It was a high cost they were willing to bear. They set the standard for urban hospitality, and we pass on this legacy that when we have any opportunity to host foreign guests and teams. As best as we can.

I remember two Singapore churches who invited the wider body of Christians in the city for training conferences, one a 1000-member church, another a 100-member church. Both church families overwhelmed us with their corporate generousity and kept piling on us hospitality, gifts to the extreme. What they were doing were not just for the conference or training, but they were simply demonstrating what they do on a weekly basis. It was again, lifestyle generousity on a corporate scale. The larger church focused on their immediate community while the smaller church had only one ministry: street kids. What was amazing, was that the hospitality shown was not a messy, spontaneous show, but a intentional lifestyle originating from their leadership and administration.
If the Lord puts you in a position of leadership in an organization or church, will you be willing to model Christ’s generousity corporately?



Mentors
I am blessed to know two great men who have taken the past decade of their lives to listen to countless hours of our cries for help, counselled us late into the night, and was intentional about teaching us the bible several times a week no matter how fatigued they are. They showed us generousity of love in longsuffering-ness. The older mentor was actually the mentor of the younger mentor for more than 25 years! They taught me how to give, nurture, build love over a long, long period of time. They showed me how sowing and discipling is never a once-off 6-month programme, but life on life over a lifetime.

Are we willing to be this generous in our longsuffering to build up the present youth and children?


Books
If there is one book on generousity, it must be “No Greater Love” Mother Teresa. In there, the late great Mother Teresa (now St. Teresa) pens her thoughts and reflections from her several decades of work among the slums in Kolkata. In there she transparently shares her trials, and her struggles to even be generous day by day. One refrain she writes often, is the passage in Matthew 25:40, where King Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Mother Teresa reflects that each act must be a worship to Jesus. Her love for Christ is true and devoted and she writes about Jesus throughout the book, how His love His generousity enables her to do the work even when she does not want to.

She challenges her readers to “give till it hurts, and give till it hurts no more”

Experiment on your own
Despite having all these people in my life, the most difficult is still to live out this generous lifestyle. I can learn all I want and end up never doing, or never intending to do. In 2014, I attempted to try to incline towards giving often. I realized how much of a taker I am rather than a giver. It was a very hard time to change life-long inclinations.
Only the knowledge that God was generous and he wants to use us to be his generous representatives here on earth.

In that year, I found myself vacillating towards all kinds of extremes.

There were days when I did not want to give at all, and I became self-indulgent and ‘gave’ to myself. Other times I gave out of selfish motives.

These are times we realise that our hearts truly need Christ’s cross and we truly need to be saved.
What began as an experiment to try be more generous revealed how much a taker I am.

When we begin to comprehend the amazing grace Christ truly gave all for us, we begin to comprehend that we are called to be on His mission to exhibit his generousity. Read on how poor Macedonia gave abundantly in 2 Cor 8-9, which was the guiding passage on generousity.

Love & The Daddy Heart of God

In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul expounded in his famous treatise of the ‘more excellent way’: Love. 1 Cor 13:3 “ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” That even if we give away everything, but do it not out of Christ’s love, we gain nothing.

Nothing.

Our generousity must be an outflow from Christ love to us, and also an intentional message about our Daddy God’s love.



You might wonder, “I am no Mother Teresa”, “I am not rich”, “I am not in some noble helping professional”. The life models of the several peoples who showed me about their generous giving life were from all walks of life, very poor to very rich. It is a consistent intentional lifestyle to be generous.  

Christian generousity must and should differ from what everyone else does. We have a message of a very rich king who emptied himself and became poor, died rose again, so we can be adopted to His family and allow Him to demonstrate His living life in us.

 A well-known pastor in my city-state wrote extensively about the God of the How Much More. In Matthew 7:11 “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Get to know your Daddy God intimately. And as his child, we live out the identity he given us: Child of God. And from there we reflect our Daddy’s generousity to all.















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