The opportunity and invitation to create impacts, give to causes, and leave legacies surround us daily.
We are solicited by phone, mail, and even grocery store checkout to round up, add a dollar, or offer a substantial contribution to a cause.
The repetitiveness of these requests elicits a plethora of responses ranging from aggravation to insignificance to joy, all of which correlate to our practice of a simple virtue — our desire to live a life of gratitude.
Giving from heart and home
As a young newlywed and soon-to-be parent, I often felt guilty trying to offer a weekly tithe while simultaneously feeling the pressures of college loans, rent, and groceries.
I have never wondered why finances are the number one stressor of American families.
Far from trusting God, the monthly “giving” basket was the last priority on my budget.
How was I going to help the Church when I was barely able to support my family?
Yet, my wife and I were confronted with many opportunities to respond in a particularly generous way.
She often reminded me we could not out-give our Lord, and in practice, these moments grew my trust in Him.
More so, each cultivated growth in gratitude — seeing the blessings we had and the needs we could help fulfill. Gratitude was the key to moving from guilt — trying to figure out “if” we could give — to giving — making tithing our first priority. Giving felt good and improved our gratitude. Yet giving also has practical consequences.
Giving improves our quality of life
A study from the nation’s top universities – Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale — revealed that givers have higher statistics of well-being: Decreased incidence of depression, delayed mortality, and even a propensity to good fortune.
More interestingly, the study demonstrated that giving did not just correlate with higher income, it actually caused it.
Psychologists and neuroscientists researching these results surmised that the positive metrics had as much to do with a giver’s outlook of gratitude as it did with the actual giving.
In other words, givers enjoyed a happier life than non-givers.
A Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey of 30,000 American households further revealed that households with traditions of giving to charity were 43 percent more likely than non-givers to report their lives being “very happy.”
G.K. Chesterton once said, “A living is made by what we get, yet we make a life by what we give.”
Through giving we enhance and perpetuate both our own lives and the lives of others.
Proverbs 13:22 informs us that a good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, while Jesus instructs us in Matthew 6 to lay up treasures in Heaven and not on Earth.
There is a natural tension between these two concepts relating to the purse, yet too often we think of our legacy strictly in terms of money.
We must realize that it is better to build healthy values, virtues, and character and to cultivate gratitude and generosity than to strictly pass on material possessions to our children and grandchildren.
In so doing, we will continue to offer back to God our response of discipleship, one that begins with gratitude.
Scott Klaas is the executive director of the Catholic Diocese of Madison Foundation (CDMF). Check out diocesemadisonfoundation.org to learn more about the mission of the CDMF and its work to provide resources for the parishes, schools, ministries, and apostolates of the diocese. Interested in joining the CDMF team? Inquire at 608-821-3046.