Five

Becoming the Gift the World
Needs—and You Need

It is beyond the realm of possibilities that one has the ability to out give God. Even if I give the whole of my worth to Him, He will find a way to give back to me much more than I gave.

CHARLES SPURGEON

A hunching giant of a man who now lives in Room 112 at the nursing home in town, he had prayed for our boys every day. He’d shown me their names scrawled on his list and said it like an answer to prayer. “Never live for battles won or for the end of your run. What matters is how you live in ‘the along.’ And it’s there in the along that you have to remember: people care more what you share with them than what you ever say to them.”

I grab that tin bucket the Farmer left on the top step at the back door. I pour every single one of the 25,550 wheat kernels out of that dusty Mason jar that’s been sitting up there on the windowsill since the beginning of the year, looking like a time capsule. Like a dare to break time.

I fill it with water and glads and schlepp a bunch of those jar vases over to the nursing home. The kids and I leave them in the doorways of the residents’ rooms, and there’s no missing the beauty of what these have held and what they’re containers for now—or how entire wings of the nursing home light up in these thousand-watt smiles. On hard days of wrestling with time and pieces of your broken past, turns out you can always find a way to reach out your hand and just turn the light on.

When we’re standing in Room 112 with Mr. Bender, he leans worn and tall over us and asks us to sing one more hymn, and I choke it back a bit when he says right at the end, just before we leave that Mason jar of glads with him, “Promise you won’t shed a tear when I finally come to the end of my run and I’m not here but have up and gone? You’ll know I am finally home with my God.”

Koinonia, communion.

The soul craves more than only communication; it seeks communion. Is the most authentic communication always a kind of communion, a breaking and giving into oneness, into love?

Mr. Bender reaches over and squeezes my hand and nods, and time divides and flies. Someday Mr. Bender will. It begins right there and I can feel it: something that’s been broken in you . . . can start to break.

Let it come. Let it come.

I don’t think I know quite what that could mean.

Leaving the nursing home, we pass the police car on Main Street in front of Chocolates on Main, and those crazy boys of ours want to leave a box of cookies there on the hood of a sunning cruiser. They have no shame in saying a little too loudly the box may be mistaken for a bomb.

It’s all like a slow match in me that could start an explosion. Could there be a better way to spend time and find the meaning of being and celebrate another birthday, than to break through the anxiety that keeps a life bound and small? What if it detonated in my own heart: reach out your one weak arm and let your own brokenness start to mend and touch the heat of communion? Can I trust that He’s enough in me to make me enough? This is all part of the figuring, the finding of the way.

The measure of your willingness to be given—is the measure of your capacity for communion.

We grab a pie at Zehrs Markets and drop it off at our doctor’s office and thank him for catching babies. We head to the local coffee shop and pay for a line of coffees behind us (“Yes, really. Yes, we’re serious. Yes, for real!”). We grab a dozen donuts to deliver to the fine folks at the town office.

And there’s this moment, a glance catching my reflection in the coffee shop window, and this grinning, birthing thought: learning the art of living is learning the art of giving.

For God so loved that He gave . . .¹

The art of giving is believing there is enough love in you, that you are loved enough by Him, to be made enough love to give.

For God so loved that He gave . . . Is there any word more powerful than giving? Thanksgiving. Forgiving. Care-giving. Life-giving. Everything that matters in living comes down to giving.

“Giving is true having,” is what Spurgeon said.² There’s the whole street looking back at me in the window’s reflection. What if there are times you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead?

The love of God always gives, always breaks itself and gives—to give joy. God seeks His own glory only because He vows that He is the God who gives—gives what we need most.

There’s an ache in me that needed all this. Like it’s the beginning, the way, to something more.

For a string of thirty days, as part of this dangerous dare, we’d read it aloud as a family after the evening meal, read God’s beckoning words:

“What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’ ”³

There are lights turning on, all down the street. I can feel things inside, broken things, turning around, a passage being paved through Him. A way.

“Do you hesitate, man, to go this way, when this is the way that God came to you?” Augustine murmurs from the edges of things.⁴ Something’s happening in the giving . . .

The police officer’s chuckling over his box of cookies.

God is most glorified in us when we are most enjoying Him—and giving others the joy of Him.

And I want to reach out and cup the face of that birthday girl staring back at me in the coffee shop window and convince her: there is no life worth living without generosity because generosity is a function of abundance mentality. And abundance mentality is a function of identity and intimacy. When you know you are loved enough, that you are made enough, you have abundantly enough to generously give enough. And that moves you into the enoughness of an even more intimate communion.

I think maybe this is touching the edge of the true nature of the dare?

It’s like an enfolding ring: it’s the presence of Christ who gives us every single gift. And the presence of Christ makes us into the gift given. There are no gifts in the world, given or received, without the presence of Christ. Christ gives the gifts to us, and then—He within us, indwelling us—He gives the gifts through us to a beautiful and aching world.

Bread broken and given, shared.

“He broke it and gave it . . . The bread which we break, is it not the koinonia, the communion, of the body of Christ?”⁵

What we break and give comes back to us as a bit of communion. Koinonia, a soul sharing, a givenness, a participation. The very moment of my salvation in Christ made my union with Christ an objective fact, but it’s not until this moment of realization of communion with Christ that there’s experiential joy.

This is a sort of communion.

When you walk into a diner across the street and tell the waitress you’re paying for that family’s dinner, it’s a thing you don’t forget, and it feels like an act of re-membering. The waitress laughs and you wink and leave before they’re finished at the all-you-can-eat buffet. A diner and hungry people and the presence of Christ in you, reaching your unsure hand out, can taste like a sacrament.

Live eucharist. Practice communion. Taste koinonia. Feel abundant life. All I can think is this: this is how you make the ever-present Christ fully present. This is the beginning of becoming the gift. Allow Christ in you to give away the gift of Himself right through your brokenness. God gives God so we can be the givers. The gift-ers.

This truth of “the blessedness of possessing nothing” and all such truths, writes Tozer, “can not be learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them . . . If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy we must go this way of renunciation. And if we are set upon the pursuit of God, He will sooner or later bring us to this test.”⁶

Being in pursuit of Him as He relentlessly pursues me in this growing intimacy had brought me sooner or later to this, this dare to live the communion of living the shape of the cross, living cruciform.

The boys gift the tennis court with a whole bunch of tennis balls (“Don’t you think some kids are gonna be surprised, Mom?”). And I slip into the back door of the library, leave a few of my favorite books at the desk; then the whole lot of us circle over to the grocery store on Mitchell Street, put away grocery carts, grab a few bags of groceries, and drop them off at the food bank. Stick quarters into bubble gum machines at Walmart. Scope out the grocery store to buy a cart of groceries for someone. Tuck parking fees into envelopes, and slide them under windshield wipers for those in the hospital parking lot.

The Farmer winks at me and laughs, stuffing envelopes. “You know what? We’ve got time for this.”

I nod, wink back. Time is made for dying in a thousand ways, so why be afraid of dying when a kind of dying could come all the time? Live every day like you’re terminal. Because you are. Live every day like your soul’s eternal. Because it is.

MAYBE THE ONLY
ABUNDANT WAY FORWARD
IS ALWAYS
TO GIVE FORWARD.

And, obviously, we can’t pay the cosmos back. So maybe we forget about paying it forward? We can only give it forward. Give It Forward Today. Be the GIFT. Give Him. Maybe the only abundant way forward is always to give forward.

I don’t even know who has the audacious idea to go up to the dollar store and leave dollars up and down every aisle, but our kids watch unsuspecting kids wander in. Smiles break up every aisle. And maybe a bit of the world’s brokenness breaks by this good brokenness.

This boy in a ball cap stops at the counter and picks up a lollipop we’ve taped a note to: “Here’s a dollar. Pick any color. We’re Giving It Forward Today. #BeTheGift.” His face explodes in this smile, and bits of joy lodge in the brokenness of me and I feel a bit remade.

Smiling at anyone is to awe at the face of God. And “the beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter.”⁷ There’s a clerk grinning at the till. The guy stocking shelves is chuckling. There are people Giving It Forward Today, and don’t think that every gift of grace, every act of kindness, isn’t a quake in a heart that moves another heart to give, that moves another heart to give, that grows into an avalanche of grace. Don’t say this isn’t what a brokenhearted world desperately needs, don’t say it isn’t how to change a broken world. What if the truth really is that every tremor of kindness here erupts in a miracle elsewhere in the world?

I can feel it like the slightest sense of a suturing along raw and ragged scar lines. Maybe our suffering and brokenness begin a kind of healing when we enter into the suffering and brokenness of the world, right through the brokenness and givenness of Christ.

And these acts of kindness, gifts of grace, they start a cascade of grace to fill a multitude of canyons in a hurting world. Maybe there’s no such thing as a small act of giving. Every small gift of grace creates a love quake that has no logical end. It will go to the ends of the earth and change the world and then it will break through time and run on into eternity.

I would read later that those who perform five acts of giving over six weeks are happier than those who don’t, that when you give, you get reduced stress hormone levels, lowered blood pressure, and increased endorphins, and that acts of kindness reduce anxiety and strengthen the immune system. Five random acts of kindness in a week can increase happiness for up to three months later.⁸ “He gives by cartloads to those who give by bushels,” writes Spurgeon,⁹ and I’d think of that tin bucket with its 25,550 kernels of wheat. Maybe if all you have to give are handfuls, He might make a broken heart full?

But really—what if I were just trying to self-medicate anxiety? What if this were just a way for me to outrun the demons taunting me about my uselessness? Yet the happiness of givenness is a balm that works its healing even days and weeks later, and givenness does not define or prove our value, but lets us feel the defining value of love. Givenness changes our body because we become part of His Body. And we are even fed communion through our own brokenness. Maybe even in any of our misguided motives of givenness, even then, we are guided back to communion to reap the benefits of love.

A little girl stands there grinning with her lollipop, and I wink and grin back and I don’t know if they call this the ministry of smiling or the ministry of presence, or falling in love with God in a thousand ordinary faces. But our Hope-girl leans into me, smiling at the sucker-licking girl, and whispers, “Don’t you think giving is the greatest?” She’s smiling like her heart might burst. “Look at her! I mean—giving is the most beautiful of all.”

“. . . and the one who gives a drink of water will receive water.”¹⁰

There’s this elixir in the veins, and giving is always the greatest, the most beautiful of all, because maybe giving is the shape of what love is—cruciform. Love gives. “Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way.”¹¹

And that’s what I’m thinking right then, because that’s all I know right now: Love must give to the beautiful people in the backstreets of wherever our feet land, beautiful people living near us and sitting across from us and streaming by us, and no matter what anyone’s saying, everyone’s just asking if they can be loved. Love gives and every smile says, Yes, you are loved. Love gives, and huge acts to try to make someone happy don’t make anyone as hugely happy as simply doing small acts to make someone feel loved.

It’s strange how that is: everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to do the small thing that makes just one person feel loved.

Giving is how we pass the holiest sacraments. It’s the given bread and wine—love—that speaks to what heals the world’s wounds. He who was the smallest, most fragile Gift broke into time to save the world. Why hadn’t I come to it long before I had to blow out this many candles? When I abandon self into givenness, the feelings of abandonment give way to abandoning myself to God and finding full communion.

Koinonia is always the miracle.

You know how you may have words for something, but you don’t yet know the meaning of those words until you incarnate them? Some words only gain meaning when they have skin on. I knew those words to be truth. But I didn’t yet understand what those words meant lived in my skin.

What’s more, honestly, this birthday spent gift-blitzing the whole town seemed ridiculously small and insignificant. Beginnings always are, I suppose. First steps always seem like not enough, but they are the bravest and they start the journey to where you’re meant to go. It takes great trust to believe in the smallness of beginnings.

“The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ—to make them little Christs,” C. S. Lewis wrote.¹² What if being little Christs means doing the smallest, littlest things in Christ and letting only His great love make it great? Luther rejoins: “As our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor . . . and each one should become . . . a Christ to the other.”¹³ Given.

The broken world could change, the busted-hearted could change, even the broken could be Christ to the other—and He alone changes everything.

After I give a box of chocolates to the nurses up on the pediatric floor, I turn to the Farmer and say it slowly to him, “For an introvert feeling messy and broken and battling the edge of depression, it takes ridiculous stores of courage to keep reaching out, to break out of your comfort zone and give like this.”

But look at what Christ did!

Maybe—maybe there’s a Comforter who holds us gently in our brokenness . . . which is very different from a comfort zone that’s a death trap to break us. And the art of really living may just involve figuring out that difference.

There is a time to be comforted . . . and a time to come and die into a greater kind of comfort. And like that song of givenness running under and through the atoms of the universe, the Farmer says the verses quietly: “If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed . . .”¹⁴

And I turn in the shade of the old maples lining the hospital parking lot and join him: “. . . then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”

The light feels warm. Dappled on faces. The Farmer only nods to me. There’s not much to say when you feel a holy change beginning: our broken night could become like the noonday. Light could rise in all this darkness—in us, in the ache of unspoken broken, in all this busted world. We will begin here and trust that this will lead us: spending yourself is how you pay attention to joy; spending yourself is how you multiply joy.

The angling sun sends shafts of light between the trees and onto us both standing there, and over his head, I can see how this myriad of insects had webbed their way in the beams, ascending and descending like glory bits from seraphs’ wings. I was made for this. The universe was made for giving. Givenness.

“Every Christian,” wrote Lewis, “is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else . . . It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.”¹⁵

We exist to be Little Christs. Not Little Ladder Climbers. Not Little Control Freaks. Not Little Convenience Dwellers. Simply little giving Christs. Not ever in a way that’s divine, but simply, always, and in every way, disciples.

The term Christian means exactly that—“little Christ” . . . and that ending in the original Greek—ianos—it means to be patterned after something. The cross on my wrist—I am beginning to feel the pattern, the form, of everything. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words reverberate: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”¹⁶ And Lewis leans in: “Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.’ ”¹⁷

Come die. In a thousand ways. “Give Me all. I want you. I want you all.” Give not only all my best, but even all my brokenness?

Standing there with the Farmer under the canopy of maples, I remembered Lewis’s words echoing Christ: “I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down . . . Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”¹⁸

It’s like an echo of communion, of that intimate exchange of the givenness in my brokenness and the givenness of His acceptance. “All His is mine and all mine is His.” My own will shall become yours. “Both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do.”¹⁹ It’s like Lewis knows what I’m thinking.

You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross”—in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute He says, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” He means both . . .

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time to be “good” . . . If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.²⁰

Hand over your whole self. Your whole broken self. Givenness. Because this is far easier than pretending to be whole and not broken.

There is a strange sense of surrender happening, a surrender in all things. The heart has to be broken and plowed and resown if it’s going to yield. The change must go deeper than the surface. This is only the beginning. There’s a bucket of wheat at the back door—time—and there’s enough given to you to satisfy your soul—everything you need. And if you want your life to yield, there has to be a yielding in the soul. There is a plowing that breaks your soul to grow you.

I reach over and find Hope’s hand.

“A good day, Mama, a good birthday day.” She swings my hand high like those kids at the park. Her smile feels like grace.

“Nah.” The Farmer grins, Shalom swinging from his arm. “A great day. The best day.”

“The kids at the park, at the dollar store, the family in the diner,” Shalom singsongs the day back to us, all our boys ahead of us walking back to the van. “That old man behind us at the coffee shop, those mamas with the babies in the strollers, the family at the grocery store we surprised by buying everything in their cart, and Mr. Bender at the nursing home and all his songs.”

We lost the day in love. You can be glued to a screen or glued to your schedule or glued to your stuff—and maybe that’s just a bit of lost living. You can be a slave to getting ahead, a slave to the clock, a slave to convenience, a slave to some ill-advised American dream—and maybe that’s a lot of lost living. Maybe even in a bit of brokenness, grace moves in you to get up and give to people you love and people you’re learning to love, to go to the park and laugh with your kids or any kids, to give an elderly woman a hand and a listening ear and the gift of presence—that’s large living.

The greatest living always happens through the givenness.

When the whole crazy tribe of us GIFTers are nearly back to where we parked, Hope leans in, lays her head on my shoulder. We walk the last little bit like this, she and I. Wisps of her hair in the wind brush my cheek. The membrane between the sacred and the everyday breaks, and all is sacred in the givenness—the givenness of God through everything, the surrender of everything to Him. There is still light in the universe and wind in the world that moves in this given rhythm. There is still time to be given.

When what blows from the east sings through the wheat, it can sound like an answer to prayer. There’s a way to break brokenness. And what if you let it fully come . . . let it come?