If I have to be honest, on the night, I wasn’t terribly keen on going to the generosity dinner.
Somehow I just didn’t feel like I had the the energy to sit through debating who needed or deserved money more than someone else; everyone fighting for their own cause. Thinking back, I would not have wanted to be anywhere else that evening!
I had it all wrong in my head. Rather than the world we have come to know, where you stand up and fight for your rights and your entitlements, as a group we were able to unite and join forces to help as many people as we could. Rather than competition our hearts were stirred to compassion, and I felt like I was seeing a glimpse of what the early church was like, where “all the believers were together and had everything in common… they gave to anyone as they had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)
Not only were we able to pool financial resources, we were also able to share our knowledge- and experience-base to come up with ways to solve problems in a more permanent, and also relational, way.
I have often wondered whether we as a church body represent Jesus’ love to the poor and the broken as well as we should. I was always left thinking “surely, we can do more”. Well, at the generosity dinner we did do more and it has opened up a whole new door, for me, in terms of opportunities to be Jesus’ hands and feet.
I am super keen! Let’s go, God.
Charissa Le Roux,
Cape Town, South Africa
[To learn more about hosting your own Generosity Dinner, click here]