“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” John 6:9
“Can money buy happiness? It depends on what you spend it on. A survey of 632 Americans found that spending money on other people was associated with significantly greater happiness, regardless of income, whereas there was no association between spending on oneself and happiness. This study also found that employees who spent more of their bonus money on others reported feeling happier than they had before receiving the bonus, while other types of spending had no effect on happiness.
Additionally, participants in a lab experiment who were told to spend money on someone else reported greater happiness than participants who spent money on themselves, regardless of whether they spent 5 or 20 dollars. This suggests that altering our spending patterns so that we spend as little as 5 dollars on another person could make us significantly happier.
Why, then, do people not spend more of their disposable money on others? The prior study looked at that question, too. A significant majority of the participants predicted that spending money on themselves would make them happier than spending on others. This suggests that people are not inherently aware of the happiness benefits that can come from spending their money generously, and that interventions that promote such spending may help increase societal happiness.”
Summer Allen in “The Science of Generosity” White Paper produced by the Greater Good Science Center.
Today I am preaching twice on from Mark 6:30-44 at a local church, Rosa de Sarón, in San José, Costa Rica. The title of my message is “The Power of Generosity: Change your Mindset and Change the World.”
While my message does not cite this research, one aspect of mindset change relates to the finding that “people are not inherently aware of the happiness benefits that can come from spending their money generously.”
For example, the first disciples focused on the size of the need and instead of celebrating the boy’s sharing, they disregarded it as having any possible impact on himself or the people.
The fact that a significant majority of the people in the research study “predicted that spending money on themselves would make them happier than spending on others” shows the need for mindset change and teaching on generosity.
We “think” that our giving can’t make a difference for others and we don’t realize the impact it can have on us. So, here’s a challenge for you as you read this research on the impact of giving $5 or $20.
Make a gift of any size today to GTP. Don’t do it for me, do it for the national workers we serve like this group from Heredia, Costa Rica (pictured above). But why support efforts that serve them.
They want to help form a peer accountability group (like ECFA in USA) for churches and ministries in Costa Rica. Your gift sent us to serve them. Click here to give and assess later how you feel about it.
The cost of this teaching or training trip serving 8 groups in the four provinces of Costa Rica including air travel for our team of three is about $6,000. A small price to shape the future of ministry in a nation.
I pray someone deploys $6,000 of God’s resources and then sees how that makes them feel.