I Am The One They Expect To Give

It happened by degrees and nobody decided it.

There was a year when you had a bit more and you were glad to. There was another year when somebody was struggling and you covered something quietly. There was a year when you noticed you were the only one who had remembered the person nobody remembers, and you did it again the next year because now it was a thing you did.

And somewhere in there you stopped being a person who gave and became the one who gives, which is a different job with a different set of expectations attached.

Nobody in your family would put it that way. If you asked them they would say nobody expects anything, and they would mean it. But everybody knows what happens, and what happens is that you do it, and an expectation that nobody would ever state out loud is still an expectation, and it is the hardest kind to move.

This year there is less. Not a catastrophe. Less.

And you have already started working out how to make less look like the same amount, which is a project you have given yourself, at night, without wages, and it has been running for a few weeks.

I want to say the difficult thing first. If you simply produce a smaller amount on the day with no warning, it will be read. Not maliciously. But it will land as a message, and the message people invent is almost always worse than the true one, and it very often has them in it: she is annoyed with me, something has changed, we did something.

According to that a man hath

There is a line about giving in Corinthians that puts the measure somewhere nobody expects.

For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not. (2 Corinthians 8:12, King James Version)

Read the measure twice. According to that a man hath. Not according to the need. Not according to what was given last time. Not according to what would look right in front of the people who will see it.

According to what is actually there.

And then the second half, which is the one that does the work: and not according to that he hath not. It is an explicit exclusion. Whatever is not in your hand is deliberately taken out of the reckoning. It is not that God generously overlooks the gap. It is that the gap was never part of the measurement.

You have been measuring yourself against an amount that was never in the sum, and what is not in your hand has never once been part of the reckoning. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that arrive as relief rather than as a nice principle about somebody else's finances, and 2 Corinthians 8:12 runs the accounting on what a person has.

And notice what comes first in the verse. A willing mind, ahead of any figure at all.

You are known all the way through before anybody sees an amount, and the willing mind has never once come second to the figure. The Spirit of God is the one who knows what is actually in a person, and Scripture puts the willing mind first and the sum after it on purpose.

The job you never took on

Now the part that is actually costing you, which is not the money.

Somewhere along the way the responsibility for how the giving is received became yours. Not just the giving, which is love. For managing everybody's experience of what they get, which is an entirely different job and one nobody can do.

That is why the arithmetic runs at night. You are not working out what you can afford. You worked that out weeks ago and it took four minutes. What you are working out is how to arrange a smaller amount so that nobody feels anything about it, and there is no arrangement that achieves that, because you cannot control what a person feels.

You were never made responsible for how a gift is received, and generosity has never once been the same job as management. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells those two apart, and 2 Corinthians 8:12 stops at what a person has and does not extend the measure to how a room reacts.

And here is what the silent smaller amount does, which is the thing I want you to see clearly. It hands people a fact with no explanation. And people do not leave facts unexplained. They build a reason, and the reason they build is usually about the relationship, because that is what human beings reach for first.

Whereas one sentence, said early, removes the whole invention. It costs you nothing, it asks for nothing, and it takes the guesswork away from somebody who would otherwise spend the afternoon quietly wondering.

You have a plain sentence available that costs you nothing, and saying it early has never once been an apology. The Spirit of God is present when a woman speaks plainly instead of managing a silence, and 2 Corinthians 8:12 puts the acceptance on what is actually there.

One sentence, said early

So here is the assignment, and it is not about the amount.

Say one plain sentence to one person, before the day, naming that it is smaller this year.

Something like: things are tighter than usual so it is going to be smaller this year, and I did not want you to wonder. Or: I am doing less than I normally do and it is nothing to do with anybody.

Two elements only. It is smaller. It is not about them.

You are not asking permission and you are not apologizing, and what is in your hand has never once needed defending. The Holy Spirit steadies a woman while she says a sentence she has never said in that family, and it is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12 that acceptance runs on what a person actually has.

And choose the person carefully. The one most likely to interpret, or the one who talks to everybody, or the one you would most hate to be misread by. Not everybody. One.

I am not going to tell you what to give and I am not going to promise you that the money turns up. Nobody at this distance knows your household, and a stranger who ties provision to how much you trust God is a stranger to walk away from. What I can tell you is that a sentence said in November is a completely different object from a smaller amount discovered in December.

You are able to hand something over and have it genuinely carried, and the gap has never once been counted against you. The Spirit of God carries what a woman has truly set down, and 2 Corinthians 8:12 says not according to that he hath not as a permanent exclusion rather than a temporary allowance.