Fuel

“Just the very act of letting go of money, or some other treasure, does something within us. It destroys the demon ‘greed’.” – Richard Foster

Nothing speaks more loudly in a person’s life than generosity. When it comes from the heart, true generosity permeates every area of our lives, overflowing in obvious manifestations of benevolence toward others.

Giving has been attributed to the highest level of living.

Generous people have this abiding truth lodged at the core of their being – painted across the canvas hearts. They don’t focus the brunt of their time on what they can get from others but spend their precious time and valuable energy on what they can give to them.

This is the heart of generous people and influential leaders. It’s also the heart of the Gospel; “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16 ESV)

Generosity isn’t restricted to monetary giving or charitable contributions, although that is important and perhaps the truest form of defeating personal greed, as Richard Foster admonishes. It may mean spending more time with your family, mentoring an at-risk young person, developing a prospective leader, writing an encouraging note to a co-worker, volunteering more in your community, or sacrificing your own desires for the good of the team.

Sir Winston Churchill said, “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.”

In his book, The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, John Maxwell offers five great ways to cultivate generosity in your life:

1. Be grateful for whatever you have.

2. Put people first.

3. Don’t allow the desire for possessions to control you.

4. See money as a resource.

5. Develop the habit of giving.

In all of your doing today, take some time to think generously about how you can make a LIFE and not merely make a living. Your generosity is helping shape eternity. Don’t take it lightly – violently thrust yourself into generous living!

Are you struggling to find margin in your life?

Let me rephrase that: Are you struggling to find passion, creativity, and spiritual clarity in your life?

In his book Anam Cara, John O’Donohue tells a story about a European explorer in Africa who hired some native Africans to help carry his equipment through the jungle. They didn’t stop for three days. At the end of the third day, the hired hands stopped and refused to move on. The explorer asked why, and one of the African natives said, “We have moved too quickly to reach here, now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.”

When you don’t have margin in your life, everything else suffers. It is hurried complexity that takes the life out of life. And yet it is the simplicity of abiding in Christ that puts the life back into life (John 15:1-11).

“Recovery of the Sabbath is the most crucial and most demanding covenant command (spiritual discipline) now to be faced in the technological society.” -Walter Brueggemann

God fills the empty spaces. Having margin in our lives brings renewed passion, creativity, clarity, and purpose.

That’s why God commanded us to take a Sabbath. The word Sabbath means “to rest from labor” and “to catch one’s breath.”

Are you struggling to find passion, creativity, clarity, and orientation of purpose? It may be time to slow down and carve out some margin in your life. It’s time to let your spirit “catch up” to you. That may mean taking a break from social media, internet, and technology.

In addition to practicing a weekly Sabbath day, we need to discover how to continually rest in Sabbath-moments by taking spiritual breaks a few minutes each day. By keeping the discipline of a Sabbath we can have our passions renewed and reoriented with Christ, a deep inner tranquility sustained by union with God and intimacy in prayer.

We need pauses… we need margin… we need renewed spirits. We don’t get that renewed passion by violating the covenant command to find rest. Find it, or burnout. There’s not another option.

We all have a negative response internally, to a negative occurrence that took place externally. “It is the basic stimulus response modality,” says Craig Sanders.

Although we can’t control the things that happen around us, we do have control over how we will react to them. In his blog, Sanders offers keys to turning your setbacks into accelerated comebacks in life, business, or career.

Read his advice on Three Ways to Break Negativity in your life.