“It might seem obvious that generously giving money away involves a loss—of the money itself, of course, and of the goods, experiences, or savings that the money might have provided the giver had it not been given away…Being generous would appear to exact a net cost to the giving person. Generosity should seem to balance out to a relative deficit…Not so. Not at all. The reality of generosity is instead actually paradoxical.
Generosity does not usually work in simple, zero-sum, win-lose ways. Rather than generosity producing net losses, in general, the more generously people give of themselves, the more of many goods they receive in turn. Sometimes they receive more of the same kind of thing that they gave—money, time, attention, and so forth. But, more often and importantly, generous people tend to receive back goods that are often more valuable than those they gave: happiness, health, a sense of purpose in life, and personal growth.”
Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson in The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose (Oxford: OUP, 2014) 1.
As I have been teaching on generosity lately, I have felt moved to remind people that when we give generously in obedience to the teachings of Jesus, we don’t end up empty, we end up enriched. Sure enough, when I revisited this book by Smith and Davidson this morning, I found that they not only support this notion, they demonstrate it’s validity through extensive research.
Why help instead of hoard? Why share instead of storing up treasures on earth? It’s the paradoxical pathway that Jesus has marked out for us, and it will not leave us empty, but rather, enriched.