Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.
Frances Chan
I will never forget the day my teenager gave me a generosity overhaul.
As often as we can afford to, we take our kids with us to Kenya to visit our maternity and transition homes, artisan groups, and the graduates we support through Mercy House. It’s an amazing opportunity, and my kids probably have no idea how lucky they are to see the world. But it’s not a vacation, although we typically use all the vacation money we can save. It’s actually a grueling trip with very little sleep, heavy traffic, a hectic schedule, and a lot of poverty and suffering for our hearts to take in. It’s a perspective overload that is often overwhelming. But we realized early on that our choice to change the world significantly changed our kids’ worlds too. So we made the decision to include them as often as we could.
Several years ago we discovered it didn’t cost any more money to stay a night or two in the city of our layover between continents. We sat down as a family and counted up the years the five of us had left together before my oldest went off to college and made a bucket list. It was one of the best decisions we ever made, and it has felt like a gift we’ve received in the middle of our giving. In the last three family trips over the past five years on our way home from Kenya, we’ve quickly explored Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome in a jet-lagged haze.
It has been a great way to make family memories and see the world, and it has made the harsh reality of reentering our culture of excess a little easier. It has also been the hotbed of some of our worst fights, such as the time we got on the wrong train and one of our kids nearly didn’t make it off, or the time we sat in the Paris airport with maps we couldn’t read and cried for an hour because we didn’t know how to get to the cheap hotel I’d booked on Expedia. Fun times! Exhaustion and foreign countries are a dangerous combination.
Madison has struggled with motion sickness for most of her life, and it has gotten worse as she has gotten older. Traveling is hard on her body. But it doesn’t stop her because she loves exploring new places. I’ve written about some of my anxiety issues, and she has inspired me to face them as I’ve watched her struggle with being sick or scared on just about every continent. When she was fourteen years old we gave her an old tour book we’d found at Goodwill and asked her to plan our visit for the two days we would be in the Netherlands. She was excited about visiting Amsterdam and fell in love with the city she had researched. We visited Anne Frank’s tiny apartment in a holy hush, walked the iconic canals, ate pancakes the size of our heads, and rode a bus to the busy shopping district during the World Cup. It was a stark comparison to the slums we had visited in Kenya and the difficult stories we carried home with us. At the same time it was good for our family because life is a balance. As much as we want to be givers, it’s healthy to be receivers too. Taking breaks, having fun, and making family memories make the giving even sweeter.
Madison loves the arts and fashion and asked if we could go into one of the towering stores in the Amsterdam city center. She tried on scarves and clothes and left excited about the purchase of a new skirt from Europe! As we walked out of the store I struggled to fit all I had seen the day before in Kenya with the excess I was surrounded by in Europe. The struggle isn’t new for me, and I’m always trying to find a balance and not lean too far to one side or the other. I was processing this when Madison leaned over, swinging her bag with her latest fashion find, and said, “Mom, I think I know what I want to be when I grow up.”
In fairness to Madison, she had no idea what I was struggling with. She was a kid who had always dreamed of shopping in Europe, and in that moment her dream had come true. I’ve learned in our international travels how much better my kids compartmentalize and process the stark differences they see between home and Kenya. They take things in stride and accept them for what they are often better than I do. Typically, I worry about how they will handle the poverty and suffering they are exposed to, but often they teach me how to handle these things by handling them so well themselves. Then sometimes, weeks or months later, I’m able to help them unravel and process hard questions and the aftermath of what they’ve witnessed.
“What, honey?” I asked with expectation. I won’t lie; I held my breath because I thought her proclamation would be huge—world changing. I was raising world changers, after all. “Mom, I think I want to be a makeup artist.”
I stopped on the ancient cobbled path and turned and looked at her to see if she was serious. “Really?” I said in a tone that literally snuffed the light right out of her eyes. And then I said, “We just left the poor in Kenya. I was hoping you would say something more . . . significant.”
Madison’s face fell in a way I had never seen before, and she turned and walked away from me. I was left following behind.
I will never, ever forget what it feels like to crush your child’s dreams. It’s a feeling I wish I didn’t know.
I chased her down that cobbled path, but I couldn’t erase the damage my careless words had caused. I didn’t realize that my statement would be the start of a difficult journey for Madison—an unspoken pressure to do something significant, something big, something befitting a world changer with her life and to set aside her gifts and her dreams and conform to a mold that I had unintentionally created in ignorance.
More than a year later our family was having another difficult discussion about what generosity had cost our family. My teens were trying to decide how to complete high school. Giving away your time and resources isn’t free, and living different from the world makes you feel different from the world you live in. They decided to transition out of public high school and for the first time become homeschoolers. Madison spoke up, “I just don’t know what I want to do after high school. I don’t know what to study in college. What if it’s not significant? What if I don’t want to lead a nonprofit some day?”
I responded, “What? Honey, where is this coming from? You can be and do whatever you want.”
And in a sudden flashback that conversation in Amsterdam came back to me and nearly knocked me over. I could see that she still believed the lie I had spoken into her tender heart. I grabbed her arms and pulled her close. She was reluctant. “I don’t care what you do as long as you do it for Jesus. Listen closely to me. Do that thing you can’t not do. Do what you were created for and offer it to God, and you will change the world. Be a makeup artist for Jesus because you will reach people I could never reach. You can change the world in a way I can’t.”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. “A makeup artist?” I realized she didn’t remember the details of our conversation in Amsterdam, and I was grateful for small mercies. But she did remember feeling the pressure to do something significant, and I will never forget the lesson she taught me about my lack of generosity.
Madison reminded me that Jesus wants what we have. He doesn’t want us to give what someone else has or do something someone else does. Raising world changers starts by loving our kids for who they are and by encouraging them to follow their passions. When we do this, we teach them there is a God-given purpose behind their talent or passion and we encourage them to pursue what they love. God gives us gifts to be given away. I heard this quote from Martin Luther King Jr. in church one Sunday and quickly wrote it down: “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”1 God makes us unique so we can change the world in our unique way. This is the heart of generosity.
When I was honest with myself, I discovered four reasons I wasn’t generous in my response to Madison that day. I believe these reasons also plague our culture and even cause the church to lean toward a posture of clenching what we hold tightly instead of opening our hands freely.
1. Selfishness. We naturally and even automatically think of ourselves first. How will this affect me? What will this mean for me? When I peeled back the layers of my response to Madison’s statement I saw pride and selfishness, and it was ugly. No one has to teach us to be selfish, but we do have to train ourselves to be selfless.
2. Ignorance. We are not generous because we don’t know or choose not to know how other people feel or live. Or we refuse to acknowledge that what we have is more than enough. Selfishness often blinds us so that we only see ourselves and are ignorant of other people’s situations. Of course, enlightenment happens when we choose to see the light.
3. Fear. Fear is one of the biggest foes of generosity. We are afraid of the unknown, and we simply don’t trust that God has our and our child’s best interest in mind. We are also afraid of what we can’t control (see me waving my hand in the air). So we clamp down on what we can control—our money, time, and kids.
4. Lack of trust. Lack of trust goes hand in hand with fear. We believe we know what is best for our lives and our family’s lives. We don’t give because we don’t trust that God will continue to provide what we need. I recently heard a Bible teacher claim that the word trust is a much better translation of the word faith in the Bible because it denotes action. The next time you read a passage with the word faith in it, try substituting the word trust and see how the revision changes the way you look at God’s Word.
I love the way The Message translates James 2:14–18. The section is subtitled “Faith in Action.” Or trust in action?
Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith [trust] indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?
I can already hear one of you agreeing by saying, “Sounds good. You take care of the faith [trust] department, I’ll handle the works department.”
Not so fast. You can no more show me your works apart from your faith [trust] than I can show you my faith [trust] apart from my works. Faith [trust] and works, works and faith [trust], fit together hand in glove.
Givers do something. They don’t just talk; they act. When I think of generous people, I don’t always think of those who are generous financially. I think of people like Shannon, for example. For years she cut and colored my hair in the bathroom in her house. She chose a home salon to keep her costs down and offered her services at a discount and by donation so people like me who couldn’t afford hundreds of dollars at salons could hide their gray in dignity. But she didn’t just do my hair around my schedule; she usually fed me too. Watching Shannon in the kitchen was like watching an artist paint a canvas. She loved to bake and prepared amazing meals. One week she even sent me home with not only great hair but also a complete homemade meal for my family after hearing I’d had a stressful day. She showed up more than once at Mercy House and shared delicious homemade cookies. Shannon gave away what she’d been given. She understood her gifts and shared them with others.
I don’t know if Martin Luther King Jr. ever got to stand in a reverent hush while craning his neck to view the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that Michelangelo spent years painting, but I have with my husband and kids. I’m so grateful that God is working on our kids despite our mistakes as parents. Sometimes he offers us a foreshadowing of who they are becoming, and we see a masterpiece in the making.
Last year God gave me a brief look into Madison’s heart, and it is a stunning treasure.
“Mom, are you awake?”
Uh-huh.
It was 3:00 a.m. and Madison, my brand-new seventeen-year-old at the time, was lying next to me in a double bed in a small New York City hotel room. We had spent the day meeting fair-trade artisan groups I work with at Mercy House.
I had decided to take an impromptu trip to the Big Apple to visit the Handmade Global Market and see if it might be a good place for our nonprofit to wholesale our fair-trade product in the future as a way to provide more jobs for the impoverished women we empower. At the last minute I decided to bring Madison with me.
She has style, has her finger on the pulse of market trends, and is wildly artistic, and I knew this trip would impact her—not just because it was New York City, a place she’d always wanted to visit, but also because of where she was in life.
“Mom, thank you for bringing me with you,” she whispered into the dark hotel room.
“You’re welcome, honey. I’m glad you’re here.”
Heavy silence. She wasn’t done.
“Mom?”
I waited.
“I just want you to know that I love you. And, um, I want to say thank you for starting Mercy House. Because it has changed our lives.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and let her continue.
“I know it’s hard and you worry about the impact Mercy House has had on us kids. A few years ago I felt lost and then angry, and I wondered where God was. But, Mom? I’m proud to be your daughter, and I love where God has taken us.”
Wet tears slipped down my cheeks and soaked my pillowcase. She wasn’t done. We talked for more than an hour in the dark. We shared sweet words that felt holy and wholly needed.
“Honey, parenting is so hard. When it’s all said and done, I just want to lead you to Jesus,” I whispered, afraid to say more lest the dam break.
“You have, Mom.”
I silently thanked God for the conversation. It didn’t change anything, but it changed everything. The next day we were still the same mother-daughter duo arguing over where to eat, but our relationship had deepened and we both knew it. I could see the new respect in my daughter’s face as she watched me interact with nonprofit leaders and answer questions about fair-trade product. I have wondered where this wild obedience would take me. I have also worried it had taken my kids to a place of resentment and regret, and some days it has, because shifting and shaping our lives to orbit around Jesus is often difficult and painful.
My yes to God has taken me away from my family, but it’s given my kids a chance to lean on Jesus when they can’t lean on me. It’s required my kids to give up their bedrooms and beds on occasion, but it’s given them an opportunity to learn hospitality. It’s cost us some comforts, but it’s given us a chance to offer comfort.
My biggest fear isn’t that my choices, this path, will make the way tougher for my kids because I know that they have. My biggest fear is that they might not go where I’ve been too afraid to lead them. My dreams and detours and dead ends influence my children’s stories. If I’m too afraid to step into the unknown or to live a generous life, they may be too.
Our kids don’t need our protection in the unknown half as much as they need to see us persevere in the known. Our kids don’t need our provision nearly as much as they need us to live with purpose. So as you read these words, hear my heart and do what God is asking you to do. Don’t not do it because it will affect your kids. Maybe if they see you focusing less on them and more on others, it will impact them to do the same. Maybe interrupting your life will interrupt theirs. And maybe it will be good.
I turned over, sleep was close, and I brushed my daughter’s hair away from her face. She yawned and said sleepily, “Mom, thanks for bringing me with you.” We both knew she wasn’t talking about New York.
Giving changes our home because it takes us on a beautiful journey of discovery. When we give, it impacts others. It turns us from selfish people into sacrificial ones. Generosity is risky, but great risk offers great rewards.
Raising world changers starts with letting them be who God created them to be. Sometimes we can help them discover just who they are by leaving our comfort zones. Getting out of our cultural bubble of safety and security has taught us many valuable lessons in generosity. But you don’t have to leave the country to learn them. Serving refugees or the homeless in the heart of your city, visiting a nursing home, volunteering at a women’s shelter, fostering kids, opening your life to people who are different from you, or doing something that risks your comfort will set your family up in the classroom of life.
Following are eleven lessons we’ve learned about generosity: