Bouncebackedness: Generosity

I have an ambivalent relationship with the game of soccer. My family loves it, my stepfather was a coach for years, and my brother played well into adulthood, while my own grade school years playing were mostly a struggle. After a year or so, my first coach talked extensively with my family about joining an expansion team in the league the following season. Only after the fact did I learn the endgame: I would know no one on the new team, the practices were much farther from home, and the move had served primarily to help my old coach open a slot on his own team for a better player. That taught me a lot about soccer and life which had nothing to do with ball control or goalie distribution drills. Mostly, however, it taught me about myself. Amid my resentment and hostility with my new teammates, I came to realize that I spent more time thinking about the soccer team than anyone else in the uniform did. And I wasn’t much better for it.

In my soccer experience, negativity and turning inward were a natural response to the challenges I faced. However, there was an alternative response that I could have pursued. As we have learned in this teaching series, people who are suffering can still retain some capacity for kindness and generosity. By doing so, they look beyond their own pain, and move their attention elsewhere. 

Paul gives the Corinthians the example of the generous Macedonian church to the north, who “in the midst of a very severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty, welled up in rich generosity. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability.” (2 Corinthians 8:2-3).

It’s probably not lost on his audience that Macedonia was a rural region of the Roman Empire at the time, where Corinth was a bustling and affluent port city and cultural center. Maybe it's not coincidental that we don’t seem to have any epistles in canonical scripture for the churches in Macedonia, Antioch, or Smyrna (which gets only a passing admonition among the churches in Revelation chapter 2, to “not be afraid of what you are about to suffer”). I strongly suspect that the churches in these places of suffering and hardscrabble perseverance didn’t develop the vices that required the writings of Paul and the other apostles. They got over their baggage – maybe because physical necessity forced them to, or maybe because grace moved them beyond their own ability.

What if the grace of God empowered you to give beyond your own ability?

It never occurred to me that giving to others was a measure of resilience, but the more I pray and meditate on it, the more it makes sense. The enemy would like nothing more than for our suffering to turn our thoughts inward, make us overlook our neighbors and reduce our capacity to love. It’s reasonable to assume the best lesson to learn would be the opposite. In so doing, we show ourselves and our Maker that darkness hasn’t diminished our light in the world.

And if you don’t believe me, think back on some of your darkest hours and thoughts in life. Isn’t it ironic that, even in the moments when you are miles from boasting or loving yourself, you are still entirely focused on you?

Maybe, as we heard this week, our struggles come from being in awe of something else more than of God’s grace, and needing to be slammed with the magnitude of grace one more time. Sometimes I wonder if the greater gift of grace is deliverance from hell, or deliverance from self. Sometimes I wonder if they are two gifts, or one and the same.

Written by: Chad Halcom

Edited by: Tamara Sturdivant