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Our Attempt to Excel at Giving
I have been giving a lot of thought to our giving lately. Maybe I have been motivated by my WBV post from last week on giving more than one is able, or maybe I was inspired by reading Randy Alcorn’s The Treasure Principle, mostly, though, I think I was spurred on by my wife. Whatever the reason, now seems like a great time to try to increase our percentage of giving.
Big changes
Allow me to explain…my wife gave birth to our fourth child two months ago. Since then I’ve mentioned in multiple posts that she was going to be off work for a few months. Now, she was only working two days a week but she is an Endocrinologist in private practice so that still represents a significant amount of money that she contributes to the household income. We recently decided, however, that she is not going back to work next month. For the first time, she is going to be a full-time stay at home mom (or as I like to refer to her: a trophy wife).
Of course this means significant changes around the BFN household. Since this is a PF blog, let’s get to the financial stuff – it means a 36% decrease in gross income for our family. While our income is not quite cut in half, I think you would agree that such a sizable decrease will require some adjustment.
When we first started discussing how our budget would change, I mentioned that we would now contribute less to our church and missions and other charitable organizations. Our percentage of giving is 12% this year so naturally we would reduce overall giving to be 12% of my salary instead of 12% of both of our salaries. Well, she did not want to reduce the amount we give to missionaries because they personally rely on that money. Ok, that’s valid. “The only way we can drop our giving down to 12% then is to cut the amount we give to our local church significantly,” I told her. Well, she didn’t want to do that either.
Our math or God’s math?
“Why don’t we just keep giving what we’ve been giving?” she asked me. “Because we can’t,” I replied, “the numbers don’t add up. We just can’t do that.” Of course, I’m sure you all know what she was going to say next, “Doesn’t the Bible tell us that God will meet our needs?” “Yes, but this is crazy. I mean, that’s a lot of money each month!”
I went away from the meeting without giving much thought to her proposal. I even altered our automatic donations to match up with the new numbers. Now I had always thought it would be awesome to give a much larger percentage of our income than 10% but that would be when I was making my millions and had more opportunity to give. Then I started thinking and praying and going to Iron Sharpen Iron events, and reading The Treasure Principle. My initial reaction when I seriously started considering keeping our giving at the same level was fright. How in the world could we give that much money without going way over budget each month? I mean, we hadn’t even balanced the budget in the first place since the transition and now we’d be hiking it up hundreds more each month.
Why not?
And then I started thinking things like, “Why don’t we try this? Why don’t we try giving more than our budget says we should?” And then I got excited (really, I did). What would God do with that? Would he provide opportunities for us to earn more money to keep up our giving? Would He enable us to reduce our expenses?
So last week, I changed the automatic contributions back to what they were when my wife was still working. The current plan jumps our giving from 12% of gross main career (”real job”) income to about 18%. I’ve always given 20% of my side-work income (this blog provides a bit but the majority of that income is generated through website design, development, and maintenance) though that income has so far not amounted to more than a couple thousand dollars a year. Now, I don’t want to overstate this; it’s not like this will cause us to not be able to put food on the table. Neither will we be challenging Bill Gates in how much money we’re giving away (not yet, at least).
Now what?
I have no idea what God is going to do with us through this. I do know that he promises to meet our needs, so I’m counting on our needs continuing to be met.
And my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:19 (NASB)
Ok, I admit I’m still scared by the idea, but not nearly as much as I was a few weeks ago. Frankly, I consider verses such as the verse from Ephesians below and I am excited to see how He will accomplish meeting our needs. I’m curious to see what else comes out of this as well…hopefully something awesome through which we can give glory to God!
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:20-21 (NIV)
Only time will tell how this actually works out for us. As of now, the budget does not balance. We’ve taken out some of the fat and reduced some savings, but the biggest area of spending now is our housing costs. We’ve decided to continue with this plan for three months and then re-evaluate our situation. If we’re still not making the budget work, we will have to consider more significant changes to the budget at that point – mostly focused on our housing.
Frankly, I’d love for you to join us in attempting this. Even so, I’m inviting you to keep up with how we’re doing. I’ll give periodic updates and I’m hoping that through this effort some others will be inspired to rely on God and attempt something similar.
You can’t outgive God
As I prepared my review of The Treasure Principle yesterday, I re-read with great interest a statement from Alcorn that I put into the review: “The more you give, the more comes back to you, because God is the greatest giver in the universe, and he won’t let you outgive Him, Go ahead and try. See what happens.” We’re going to go ahead and try…we’ll see what happens.
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3 Responses to “Our Attempt to Excel at Giving”
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Hey bro, excellent post. Challenging and encouraging. Over the last year our giving has been frighteningly low and my conviction over that is steadily growing. I really needed this, although I’m not so sure I’m ready to throw the switch to 18%! By God’s grace and a transformed heart, perhaps I’ll get there soon enough.
@mmountan – Thanks for your encouraging comments. To be honest, I’m not really ready to throw the switch to 18% either!
But why should logic and commonsense stop me!
I believe with what St. Michael of Assisi said “For it is in giving that we receive”. I admire your courage to give more than what you can especially in times of needs, that is really something.