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My father had a reputation within our family of being a skinflint, and not without cause. He was forever turning off lights, turning down the heat and lecturing us about the value of a hard-earned dollar, all the while muttering darkly about being driven into the poor house by his profligate family. He complained loudly to my mother that buying their four children new shoes all the time merely encouraged their feet to grow. At a time when people were still trading in cars every couple of years, he would hold onto ours until the wheels fell off. Even in his wealthy retirement, the neighbors complained that his ten-year-old Oldsmobile was driving down local property values.
And so it was a bit of a surprise to discover as I grew older that beneath that cheapskate exterior beat the heart of a very generous man, at least where it counted. He educated his four children, sending me to an expensive prep school and to an Ivy League college, sending my brother to law school and my sister to business school and paying tuition bills for five grandchildren. He couldn’t help being thrifty. He had grown up on a little dairy farm in New England during the Great Depression, and for him the poor house was never that far from his thoughts.
Whether it’s love or money, we are apt to be haunted by thoughts of not having enough. The two, in fact, are often closely intertwined. If we have grown up without enough of either, we may find it difficult to give freely. We operate under the delusion that we will somehow diminish ourselves. That’s because we image ourselves to be containers. A wallet can be emptied, so can a bucket; they are containers. But if you draw from a well, the water is replenished. So it is when we give of ourselves.
When we were just starting out, my wife and I, like most young couples, lived from paycheck to paycheck. And in our case, there was only one paycheck, since my wife stayed home to take care of our two kids. We had one car in those days, so I took the bus to work. I remember walking to the bus stop one morning, fretting about being perpetually strapped for cash. I’m not sure now whether my fretting took the form of a prayer; regardless, I got an answer, a single word, clear as a bell, in the form of a command: “Tithe.” Tithing is the biblical standard for giving, a tenth part of one’s income. To tithe means to give it away, something I could not conceivably afford to do. And yet, being young and impressionable – and apparently lacking all common sense – I resolved to do it, at least until I wound up in the poor house. My wife reluctantly went along with the idea. The funny thing was, although we started giving away a tenth of our income, we never wound up in the poor house. There always seemed to be enough money to cover our needs, and in time there was more than enough. But even when there was just enough, I realized that I was no longer fretting about money. For all intents and purposes, I had gone off the gold standard.
Tithing, for me, is more than just giving money away. Now that I am retired, living for the most part on a fixed income, I am still off the gold standard. But time is more precious to me than money, particularly as I grow older. I am conscious that I have only so much time left, yet I also realize that the time I have left is a gift, and it is meant to be shared. The same is true of my God-given talents, such as they are. If ever I fall back into thinking I need to hold onto what I have because I don’t have enough, the same message keeps coming back to me: Give it away.
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