Giving Up

We sat down together, three friends and former college roommates. I was nervous with excited tension and I didn’t know exactly why, but I’d never really done this before.

Two of us knew our little secret plan was about to reveal itself and we hoped it would be seen as grace and not pity or pride.

Our unsuspecting friend sat with ringing hands, feeling my awkward attempts at explaining why we had shown up that night. We giggled and she kept saying what and I kept saying um.

She and her husband were the ones, we knew that. The ones that would be surprised by God’s grace in the midst of tricky things.

It started with an idea, an attempt at being less careless with our much. We knew that if we started giving some things up, just small things, over some months we’d have hundreds of dollars. So we quit coffee and we stopped staring at clearance tags at Target.  We kept a tally through our weeks of what we refrained from spending. Then we’d meet and we’d ask what did you give up and then we’d share and talk about how we weren’t missing anything. Then we’d say God you have to tell us who to give this money to and we were so excited.

I had no idea I would be so excited.

It took some time, but then someone we loved was hurting, so we knew. We talked about it and said that’s what I was thinking too! So we brought the change to the bank, we piled up the bills and then they turned into one large lump sum to give.

We called our friend and said we needed to stop over.

You see, our friend and her husband are adopting from China (and are now working on a tandem adoption while they wait).  They are carefully saving and living on not the heftiest of incomes in the first place, and then our friend’s beloved sister was found to have a tumor and she was in Cambodia all by herself .  She would have surgery and it was nearly Christmas. So our friend was sad and scared and wishing she could see and hug her sister.

So there we sat and I said um…um…we have been doing this thing…this thing where we save up just little bits of money and we would turn it in one time a week and then we would pray over it and then we knew it was yours and we want you to be able to go to your sister, or put the money toward the adoption, or do whatever you need to do with it. It’s yours.

I handed her the envelope and watched her shaking hands, and I was filled with more humility than I have ever known. She pulled out that money and her high-pitched voice came, the one she uses with her emotions and the tears ran down her face, and it was so good.

We walked away and got in the car, and I felt like I’d been sitting with God. Because I think that’s what He’s all about and I knew He had done this good thing, not us.

Our friend’s sister couldn’t come home for Christmas, but soon her favorite person on the planet would board a plane to be with her. These two beautiful, loving, amazing women were met in their place of need because God is crazy about them. And all we had to do was skip some coffee and the clearance racks.

That’s why He came, that baby in a manger, the One that changes everything. He came so we could call and say that we’re coming, and then replace some sorrow with some joy.

Tagged as: Giving, Incarnational Living