Faith Works 9-25-21

Faith Works 9-25-21

Jeff Gill

Merry Christmas, yeah I said it.

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On social media back around August 25th, I posted something about it being four months until Christmas.

It was interesting to see how some welcomed this news, and quite a few others (you know who you are) responded with moans and groans. "Ah, don't go there, Gill! I'm not ready…"

Well, I'm going there. And with a practical yet theological motive at heart.

We are entering solicitation season. It's the time of year when everyone, and I do mean everyone ramps up their pitches to ask you to send them money. The holiday season from the outbreak of Halloween candy at the stores to the last of the Christmas decorations coming down after New Year's is a time we're all well disposed to giving, vulnerable to appeals for children and the weaker or injured or outcast, and less likely to stop to count the cost because we probably stopped counting a few weeks earlier.

Granted, solicitation season which used to be late November through mid-December has now opened up online and through cable to twelve months of the year. And as many of you know, I'm now regularly in the home of an elderly person who has been accustomed to sending the stray check to some fairly typical causes of the last half-century. 

Even with limited hearing and constrained perception, he's aware that his former torrent of Christmas season envelopes and mailers has become a constant waterfall of Niagara proportions ("twenty three requests this week: can you believe it?"), and he's asked me "how do some of these groups get my name?" I try to explain direct mail marketing to him and the sales of mailing lists, and he just shakes his head.

Blessedly, he can't answer his phone. Sometimes, waiting on a repair tech, I have to over a two or three hour period, and the line between scammers and charitable pitches is thin one as I hear their various openings. Scams are not my subject today, but it's always on my mind. Plus I hang up pretty quickly after a muttered "I'm expecting a call."

What I want to say to anyone reading this today, effectively three months before Christmas, is the same thing I'd say in stewardship terms about purchasing and buying and spending about your giving. Don't do it out of guilt. In the name of a good and gracious God whom I honor, if guilt is making you think about making a donation, stop and interrogate that impulse, please! These folks are artists in guilt, Hendrixes on your heartstrings, Picassos of pulling at your motivations. Do not trust guilt.

Instead, friends, think mission. What is YOUR mission in this world? If you've never thought about it in those terms, huzzah and I've done my job for now. You, my dear readers, each have some purpose and meaning in your life that God is at work through you to accomplish. Do you know what it is? What is a delightful and mischievous God trying to nudge you into getting done? Think about this idea as your mission, your theme, your particular role with a certain cast of characters around you.

If you find your heart sings and your immediate sense of purpose fulfilled by sending a check to a cat sanctuary in Kabul, then God bless you. I don't get it, but the Lord bless you and keep you. You know your mission better than I do, or at least you should.

But if you sign up for a monthly automatic deposit because you saw a sad puppy late at night while you scraped the bottom of a carton of ice cream, I doubt you're fulfilling your purpose or living your heart. You're letting a skilled guiltshop sell you their mess of pottage in return for money you can't get back (it's a Biblical reference, let it go if it's over your head). Do not let guilt be your guide, because it doesn't work.

Give intentionally, give according to a plan, give in alignment with your purpose in being given those resources in the first place. You may or may not be a person of faith, but if you believe you might have a purpose, I want your giving to line up with and reinforce and affirm who God wants you to be, even if you're not so sure about God, or whether God cares about you. God knows I do! 

Give to celebrate the good you would honor. Let guilt go on by.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got more to say about scammers, but he has to edit that one for language. Tell him where you like to give of yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.