Katie

My 10 year old, Katie, has been working harder than usual around the house, looking for extra ways to earn money to buy Christmas gifts. Not sure you’d call it a hand-to-mouth existence, per se, but she earns and spends in equal proportions. As soon as she was paid for her work, she asked me to take her to the store so she could buy Christmas presents.

At the Target cash register, she counted out almost all the money in her purse to purchase a present for Ryan. Katie got home and asked for more chores.

On her second trip to the store, she had a handful of spare change left after getting Grandma a gift. The next day, I stumbled across a note Katie had written to herself to find ways to earn additional money.

When my parents arrived for Thanksgiving this week, Katie sat my father down and explained to him that this was his last chance to “donate” some money to her Christmas gift fund.

“If you give me more money, Grandpa, I can buy you a bigger gift,” Katie told him. Difficult to argue with that logic!

Katie’s conversation with my Dad reminded me of an analogy C.S. Lewis gave in his book, Mere Christianity:

“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what that is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now.”

It’s interesting to watch my kids’ behaviors and attitudes toward money. They haven’t had to endure backbreaking labor to earn their spending money. They’re not choosing between food to eat and Christmas gifts for others, so, in a way, there’s a certain easy generosity that grows out of their abundance. It’s akin (on a vastly different scale) to Bill Gates’ ability to donate hundreds of millions of dollars without sensing a loss.

If they are called to make sacrificial gifts, I hope they do so with the same generosity they display now.

Few of us realize, though, that we actually are the Bill Gates of the world: wealthy recipients of unending grace. How miserly of us to count others’ transgressions; how horrible to hoard our time and talents and treasures when they aren’t really ours in the first place. We would judge Bill harshly if he begrudgingly gave someone in need $1,000 in light of his billions.

The abundance of our Thanksgiving tables often makes us drowsy. But gratitude awakens us. Mercy moves us so that we are able to extend our tables to others; Offer a bigger gift of grace because of what we have received.