I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread. They are always generous and lend freely; their children will be a blessing. Psalm 37:25-26
“Generous acts have the ability to lift us to a higher level where we are more human, more the person we really want to be. In the very act of encouraging someone else we are graced with awareness that life is better. Generosity has the power to make us feel better about helping others.
Will generosity save our lives? Yes, it can be an essential element in enriching our lives, building a more co-operative future, improving our emotional and physical health, and simply making life more fun. It’s also a very serious business because our society is showing the strains of violence, poverty, selfishness, and neglect.”
Dave Toycen in The Power of Generosity (Waynesboro: Authentic Media, 2004) 15.
Have you ever had one of those days where various circumstances came together to send you a message? The name of my hotel in Curitiba, Brazil, where I arrived yesterday, is Dunamys Hotel. Knowing Greek, I immediately said to myself, “power,” as dunamys is the Greek word for “power.”
Then the speaker at the conference spoke on the difference between the sermons of the book of Acts and the sermons today. He emphasized the same word, “dunamys” or “power,” from which we get the English word, “dynamite.” What’s my point and the message related to generosity?
There is power in generosity because it follows God’s design for life and living. When we live it out, we discover that there’s no other way to live because the power of generosity breaks the power of mammon in our lives? It addresses poverty, counteracts selfishness, and blesses those in need.
Generosity has the power to make us more human. You could say that’s the aim of my GTP efforts in Brazil in collaboration with Nydia Garcia Schmidt. We are here to do more than teach or speak. We are helping implement structures of accountability to empower people to unleash the power of generosity.