Easy To Give Away

She walked by, with her two children tagging along, and asked him for 20 pesos. With that she could buy a small bag of groceries from the orphanage, groceries and supplies that would cost 40 pesos elsewhere. He told her no, that he didn’t have any money to help her out.

After all, he reasoned, I am down here in Mexico donating a year of my time helping out with this orphanage. That is my service to the Lord. I am giving quite sacrificially already, if you understand, so why should I give more.

As the woman and two children walked off down the dirt road, away from the orphanage, he watched them. She looked very familiar, but he was having a difficult time placing where he had seen her before. Then he remembered. She had come up to the front of the crowd a few nights earlier, at the call of the evangelist. She had given her life to Jesus.

So he ran inside to get his wallet, and went running after her to give her the twenty pesos she had asked for. But he never found her. She was gone. The opportunity had passed him by.

That is when he heard the still small voice inside his heart say so clearly, “When you don’t consider the things you have to be your own you will find it a lot easier to give them away.”

About the same time that I heard this “orphanage” story another brother told me his “tax” story. He had not filed his income taxes for about four years, because he had moved out of town the first year and lost all his tax information in the move. So the ensuing years it seemed wise not to file taxes, either, if he couldn’t file for that first year.

Eventually he moved back to his home town, found the tax records, and tried to ignore them. But God told him otherwise. So he took all his tax info to his tax accountant, expecting to have to pay several thousand dollars in taxes, penalties, and interest. And that was going to hurt, desperately. His wife was in and out of the hospital, they didn’t even have their own place to live in, and now God wanted him to pay four years of back taxes.

Driving around a few days later God told him that when he got his tax refund back he was to give it all away. It took a few minutes to sink in, but he realized that he would not be having to pay out several thousand dollars which he didn’t even have, but instead would be getting a refund. Sure enough, the next day the accountant called and asked him to come in and sign the tax returns. “Oh, and by the way, you will be getting money back,” she said.

He hadn’t hardly told his wife the news when she immediately said that she knew exactly where they should give the money. He ended telling me his story by saying, “It’s easy to give away what you don’t consider yours to hold onto.”

“There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open handed toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.” (Deut 15:11)

It’s fine that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, just fine. Just so long as they are on the next ranch, not mine, thank you.