There is more happiness in giving than in receiving.
Acts 20:35 GNT
I remember the first time I saw the picture on my husband’s phone. I cringed and tried to grab it from him. He held it over my head as I reached for it. “Is that your profile picture? Why did you choose that picture? I hadn’t had a shower in days and look at my hair! It’s a terrible picture of me.”
I thought back to the day it was taken. I was in Kenya without my family, and our staff was visiting a home in one of the poorest areas in the city. There was nothing happy about the setting: there was no roof over our head, no kitchen, and no bathroom. I was sitting on a rock, the only furniture in the house, with a dirt floor under my feet and talking to the family of a girl we had rescued. I was scared, dirty, homesick, and overwhelmed, but I was at peace because I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be and doing exactly what I was created to do. When the photographer snapped my picture in that setting, she captured both the harsh background and the joy on my face.
Terrell laughed at my vanity and simply said, “This is my new favorite photo of you. I’ve never seen you look more beautiful. I made it my profile picture because it’s the happiest I’ve ever seen you.”
For years that picture was my profile picture too. My kids got used to seeing it. We didn’t see a mom who needed to wash her hair; we saw an expression of pure joy. Our culture is obsessed with beauty and happiness, and we will pay any price to try to grasp them. I’ve seen my kids, especially my daughters, struggle to separate beauty and happiness and understand this truth: beautiful people aren’t always the happiest, but happy people are always the most beautiful.
It’s just a matter of time before our kids are sucked into this happiness-seeking vortex. Once when I was together with an old friend I corrected my strong-willed child for bad behavior in front of her while hers got away with the very same thing. She said, “I find that my child is a lot happier when I just give in.” We eventually stopped getting together after that because I couldn’t compete with her “happy” child who was also often bratty.
I was a young mom, but I realized right then and there that a child who is happy in the near term isn’t always a healthy one in the long term. I am not anti-happy. I don’t purposefully make my kids sad or angry. I do think it’s important to stick to my guns, and unhappiness often flows from that. When children are unhappy it generally means we as parents are doing something right. Their unhappiness is often a result of us trying to shape their wills into ours and ultimately into God’s. My goal is deeper than happiness. I’m after contentment. I think any parent who deals with unhappy kids probably gets the reality of Proverbs 15:13 very well: “A happy heart makes the face cheerful” (NIV). True happiness comes from within. While grumpy faces are quite common, sometimes they are the result of a heart matter.
I’m convinced generous people are the happiest. I think most people would agree that giving makes them feel happy. A series of studies conducted by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton and two of his colleagues found that “giving money to someone else lifted participants’ happiness more than spending it on themselves (despite participants’ prediction that spending on themselves would make them happier).”1 Norton said, “We found that people who spent the money on themselves that day weren’t happier that evening, but people who spent it on others were. The amount of money, $5 or $20, didn’t matter at all. It was only how people spent it that made them happier.”2
I love that even science is a fan of giving. I ran across this 2006 study by Jorge Moll and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health who found that “when people give to charities, it activates regions of the brain associated with pleasure, social connection, and trust, creating a ‘warm glow’ effect. Scientists also believe that altruistic behavior releases endorphins in the brain, producing the positive feeling known as the ‘helper’s high.’”3
Giving not only makes us happier people but also has numerous other health benefits. It reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, makes us less depressed, and might even help us live longer!4 It can improve our marriage and relationships, according to a 2017 study by researchers at the University of Rochester: “Compassionate concern for others’ welfare enhances one’s own affective state.”5
Some of the most profound research on the correlation between happiness and generosity is found in The Paradox of Generosity by Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson. The following quote sums up well the outcome of the research: “Rather than leaving generous people on the short end of an unequal bargain, practices of generosity are actually likely instead to provide generous givers with essential goods in life—happiness, health, and purpose—which money and time themselves simply cannot buy. That is an empirical fact well worth knowing.”6
If scientific research and facts don’t impress you, happiness produced by generosity is also a biblical principle. Giving of our time, talents, and resources brings satisfaction and deep contentment. James 1:17 reminds us that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (ESV). He gives because he loves us, and he offers us an example of how we should live.
True contentment is being okay with life whether you get your way or not. When my daughter wants another new pair of shoes or the latest scarf to add to her collection, I usually want to give it to her and that would certainly make her happy (for the time being). But since my ultimate goal is to reduce entitlement, feed gratitude, and produce contentment, I don’t automatically buy it for her. While I do sometimes buy my kids things just because I want to, I don’t always, and this alone can produce temporary unhappiness. I often make them save, work, or wait for it, and occasionally I treat them after they’ve worked hard for something they’ve had their eye on.
I love the truth of this pointed statement from Dr. Kevin Leman: “Did you know that your job as a parent is not to create a happy child? That if your child is temporarily unhappy, when he or she does choose to put a happy face back on, life will be better for all of you?”7
We live in a culture that is terrified of raising unhappy kids. We overindulge, cater to every whim, and often let them grow up much faster than they need to. When the Bible talks about trials and tribulations testing our faith and making it stronger, that’s not intended only for adults. It’s for believers. Some of the best lessons my kids have learned are through their own personal hardships (a fashion crisis, for example, can be a hardship to a preteen girl). So when our kiddos are pouting and mumbling and seem unhappy, take heart—you are doing a good job and ultimately raising healthy adults.
The truth is life can be hard. There are unexpected detours in our journeys that are heartbreaking and difficult to process. If we don’t understand this, we can’t possibly teach it to our children. We were created to be satisfied by God, not by this world, so all this searching for happiness will only lead us to unhappiness. This became especially clear when my family and I sat in a Bible study and listened to the prayer requests around the room. I caught myself thinking about the difference between first- and third-world prayers, and I wondered what in the world God must think? In one part of the world I’ve witnessed people begging God for provision for one more day, and here at home I’ve listened to good church folk asking God for more, more, more—not realizing how much they already have. God created all and loves each of us completely, but if one group isn’t helping the other (and both need help), I don’t know what we are really doing here.
I quickly swallowed down any judgmental thoughts because I knew these good people were just like me—one minute wanting to change the world and the next being changed by it.
We are so distracted by our culture of plenty that we feed ourselves all we can, yet we walk away empty and unsatisfied. Jon-Avery noticed the depth of the prayer requests too and mentioned it to me. He took it a step further and said, “Mom, it seems like even Christians try to fill their lives with stuff, and no matter how much they have, they want more.” He was referring to friends who live in a stunning home, and their prayer request was about selling it to build a better one. It’s confusing. We talked about it for a while, and I reminded him that distraction was one of the tools of our greatest enemy. And even though it might look different in our lives, we were guilty too.
A few days before that Bible study I had taken my kids into Houston, now the most diverse city in the United States, and we spent the day welcoming an Iraqi family from a refugee camp to Houston. I learned that many of the single moms being resettled in my city were also at great risk of being trafficked because they couldn’t take care of their babies and work a regular job. It shook me to the core, and I desired to do something to provide these women with jobs through Mercy House because that’s what we do.
If the “wanting to do something” was the same as “doing something,” we would all be Mother Teresa. But somewhere between the want to and the follow through we are often distracted by our own first-world problems. That same week we had pipes break, toilets overflow, a retainer eaten by a dog, and cars in repair, and before you knew it I was preaching to the choir and my want to fell off by the wayside. But when I read these words in John 12, I wanted to follow through: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (vv. 24–25 NIV).
J. D. Walt writes a daily devotion called Seedbed, and these words landed in my inbox in the middle of my bad week:
We so want the Christian life to be reasonable, but it is not. To give a little or even a lot is the same as giving nothing at all. The life hid with Christ in God will be everything or it will be nothing. . . . The un-surrendered life is the same thing as the unplanted seed—a waste. Why on earth would we go another day holding on to the tiny seed of our life? It’s time to sow our small, fragile selves into the field of God’s dream for our lives. What if the little boy had shared his five loaves and two fish with the crowd? How far would it have gone? Exactly nowhere. Instead, look what happened when he surrendered all he had to Jesus. Precisely unimaginable. We think the Gospel is about sharing our lives with others, as though a seed could be shared. No, it’s about surrendering our lives to Jesus, who will make of our lives an unending, unimaginable gift to the world. Sharing will never get it done. Only surrender will.8
I realized I’d been trying to convince people to share what they have been given because we have been given so much. While this is not exactly wrong, it’s not what Jesus asks of us. It isn’t about sharing our lives; it’s about surrendering them. And what’s so crazy and beautiful is that when we surrender everything, we get twice as much in return! This is the key to true happiness.
It helps us balance the good and the bad—and remain happy in either—if we believe this truth from Jennie Allen, author and founder of the IF Gathering: “If we know no place, no job, no marriage, no child is going to fulfill us perfectly, we can make the choice to quit fighting for happiness in all of it and start to fight for God’s glory in it.”9 Because we can trust that God will be glorified in the mess of our lives.
Several years ago on a family trip to Kenya we participated in a local outreach as a way for the rescued teen moms to give back and remember the suffering in their city. We traveled to a home for disabled and handicapped children and spent the day serving this community. Sadly, children with special needs are often referred to as throwaways in poor areas. Many families don’t have enough food for their healthy children, and a handicapped child without resources such as education or a wheelchair is sometimes abandoned or given up. We were admonished by the staff to love these children and not to let fear stop us from serving.
I won’t lie; it was heartbreaking. The living conditions were difficult to absorb, and my senses were overwhelmed. My eyes burned at the putrid smell and my throat closed as we made our way from room to room on a tour of the facility. We were handed trays of food to pass out. Children came from all over the compound. Some limped on crutches and others crawled on bent and twisted limbs.
Many of the children couldn’t feed themselves so we spoon-fed them. I pushed away my fear and tried to be the hands of Jesus. Mostly, I tried to follow my kids’ examples. More than once, I checked to see how they were doing. I worried this was too much for them to see and experience. But every time, they assured me they were fine and even looked happy to wipe a chin and offer a plate. When Madison stood in the center of the compound to play her flute in a miniconcert, the children clapped and squealed in delight.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of my kids. They didn’t flinch when the air was filled with loud screams or a child drooled on their hand as they fed them. They accepted what we saw without questions. They hugged and served the children and taught me so much.
Receiving—being the recipients of generosity—can be a little more difficult than giving. It’s probably just plain old pride, but sometimes it’s difficult to receive even when we are desperate for what’s being given. When someone offers to bring us a meal during our busiest week of the year when we’re preparing for our biggest fund-raiser, it’s hard for me to accept even though I have no idea what my family will eat because I haven’t had time to get to the grocery store. Or when Brittany, one of our longtime employees at Mercy House, shared with her in-laws the beauty and heartbreak of our work and her in-laws offered their beautiful home in Colorado to our family the first time, I was thrilled and a little embarrassed at my eagerness to use what wasn’t mine. But I couldn’t think of anything we needed more as a family than a quiet place to think, pray, rest, and be together.
That first trip to Colorado was like drinking from a deep, deep well, and it quickly became a sacred space for our family to visit each year it was available. We even named our big, furry Sheepadoodle dog Gunnison after the beautiful Rocky Mountain town.
God revealed to me that by not receiving what was being offered—a home-cooked meal, a free vacation home, and much more—that I was stopping the stunning cycle of generosity. These beautiful people were giving because it brought them joy. And when we received it, we were letting them become a part of our story. This is one of my favorite parts of this journey: God doesn’t call all of us to do everything. But when we support someone doing something that is kingdom centered, we become a part of it too.
It reminds me of the joy I feel as a parent when I see my kids give from their hearts. Madison is the best gift giver in our home. She is wildly generous, often spending too much to buy the perfect gift. Several years ago when I watched her joy one Christmas morning, I realized she wasn’t giddy over what she received; she was happy about what she was giving. It was so sweet to watch her watch the faces of her siblings as they ripped open the presents she had carefully chosen and paid for with babysitting money. It cost her every cent in her purse, but it was worth it to her.