...make a meal for someone, write a thank you or two or three to folks who do things that make your life better- from the garbage man to the piano player at church-the note just needs to say thanks and why you are thankful, make a booklist for a shut in, then get the books they like for them from the library, pay for the person behind you in the drive through at Starbucks, babysitting, tithing, getting to Sunday School early and helping set up the chairs, take time to speak to folks you usually brush past, let someone get in front of you in the grocery line, make bookmarks for all your friends that read...
I could list here a million ways for us to give this Thanksgiving month and some would spur you on and we all need that. But what we really need is Situational Awareness. Our hearts and eyes need to be so in-tuned with what is going on around us that the needs of others are so apparent to us that we can't help but be aware of them. When you are really in-tuned with the needs of others sometime that is a very heart heavy place to be. I also believe that a need doesn't always mean a call, we need to be discerning, but it would be better to err on the side of giving too much than not enough.
Pray today that the eyes of your heart will be open to see all the needs around you and also for the wisdom to know which ones you are to meet.
Today is the half way point in this month. I have seen several blogs that are participating in a 30 days of giving challenge, it's not too late for us to start. Just do two a day!
...give someone who is late to church your hymnal so they don't have to take the time to look it up, let someone in front of you in traffic, smile at all those you see today, rake your neighbors leaves, pick up all the trash on your street, get the email address of a missionary and ask them what they did today and tell them about your life, do another family members chores for the day-without telling them...
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The first think you will notice when you move in with a healthy family is that they cannot work independently. In the first place, there is too much labor involved in raising kids for anybody to sit on the couch for an extended period of time. They are a unit, like a body with different organs or a car with different working parts. I lived with this sort of family for a while, the MacMurrays. Both John and Terri MacMurray provided incomes. Terri had a great job at an insurance agency downtown and didn’t want to leave because they needed the health benefits. They liked her so much that she worked from home most days, but she still worked. John looked after the kids when Terri was busy or running errands in town, and Terri looked after everything when John was on a photography trip. But it wasn’t just the adults that had important roles. In a way, so did the kids. It was obvious, watching them and being around them, that John and Terri took great delight in their children. They were better than television to them. And the kids felt important, I think, because they would do silly things to make their parents laugh or dangerous things and have John or Terri yelling or talking them down off the balcony railing.
It all reminded me of a book I read a few years ago called At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends. It was written by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II general who became president. I’ve always been curious about successful men, leaders, and what they know that the rest of us don’t. This book was entertaining because Eisenhower was a character, nearly getting himself kicked out of West Point, causing a lot of trouble. But always there was in him a sense of confidence, a sense he would become somebody important. And more than this, he believed the world needed him — that if he didn’t exist, things would fall apart. He believed he was called to be a great man. I wondered, as I read, where he got this confidence.
I found the reason for Eisenhower’s confidence early on in the book, in a chapter in which he discussed his childhood. Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course for his life: that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower’s parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren’t alive, their family couldn’t function.
If you think about it, it isn’t just kids without fathers who don’t usually feel important; it’s most of us. I mean, can you imagine growing up believing that if you didn’t exist, your family would fall apart? Can you imagine how different the world would be if all children were taught this idea?
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