Keep on Keeping OnSample

Keep On Giving

I once witnessed a sad scene in a breakfast restaurant.

A family of four—father, mother, a teenage boy, and a little girl—sat at a table near me. The two adults and the boy ordered large glasses of orange juice, but when the youngest, the daughter, chimed in, her father would not allow it. She pleaded her case but to no avail, and I saw genuine hurt in her eyes. What should have been a fun Saturday breakfast out as a family became an unhappy memory for one of them.

The saddest part is that it was over something completely unimportant. Perhaps the father thought he was teaching his youngest a lesson about frugality. Perhaps he was hoping to teach her the value of a dollar. When I looked into her moist little eyes, I thought he had sadly miscommunicated. He thought he was saying something about waste. You’ll never finish a large glass. Waste not, want not. She heard something about rejection. You’re not worth a large glass.

Frugality is a value worth teaching, but so is gracious generosity.

The few cents saved that day were not worth a single one of those little tears. There is a time for financial restraint, for counting the cost, and for practicing some good Puritan frugality. The price of a car, for instance. The size of your house payment. Those are just such times. There is also a time to go ahead and splurge. Lose all control! Go totally crazy! Know when it’s time to let a little girl order that large juice. Frugality and stingy living are not the same.

“To everything, there is a season…” is the wisdom of Scripture (Eccles. 3:1). There is a time to close your wallet and a time to open it even wider. If gray hair bespeaks wisdom, and it is supposed to, we seniors, better than the young, should know which season is which.

I ached to go to that family’s table and whisper in the young father’s ear, “Buy her the large juice. She will be happy, and you’ll be glad you did. I am old, and I can tell you this is a moment to lighten up and loosen up. Tighten down another time. Not at breakfast on a Saturday.”

It is a predictable and not uncommon phenomenon that many who live generous lives grow less so as they age.

Beyond financial generosity, some who have lived and walked for many years in openhearted, openhanded faith begin to tighten their grip with age. The challenge for us in our senior years is that massive, crashing waves of fear begin to erode the shoreline of our faith. Frightening questions assail us. Questions we thought we would never have to face. What is the burn rate for my life savings? Will I have enough at the end of my life? How can I keep from being a burden to my kids? What if I have huge end-of-life medical expenses? How will I pay for those? Will I be able to leave any estate to my heirs?

In response to those questions, we tend to tighten down. That’s not all bad, of course. If we are smart, we will clamp down a bit on our spending, which is a good thing, a very good thing. What goes wrong for so many seniors is that fear steals their spirit of generosity and leaves in its place the spirit of miserliness.

Giving leads to giving and withholding to withholding.

The man, at any age, who gives freely to his church is also likely to give to other causes. The man who habitually withholds his money from charitable giving is also likely to withhold his compliments and his praise and his love. Ebenezer Scrooge did not suddenly become a parsimonious wretch on his seventieth birthday. He inched his way into meanness.

The young at heart are practitioners of grace, and grace is generosity of life. More often than not, we can give less financially as we age and retire. That’s the great thing about tithing. It has nothing to do with amount. A tithe on a million dollars of income and a tithe on a social security check are the same.

A tithe is a tithe.