You’ve almost certainly been there. For the sake of the greater good, you needed to have a conversation with someone. But you know it will be hard, as the topic is one people don’t often discuss. You try to anticipate how it will be received and therefore how to frame it helpfully, but you know walls of defense will go up no matter what. Nevertheless, you persist. Because it matters…maybe even a matter of life or death.
Friends care FOR you more than what they get out of their friendship FROM you!
I have those conversations all the time, and they’re usually about money. Fortunately, the context is where people’s generosity can best express who they are most productively! Where the experience of global experts, science, and God’s word all agree your excess has been proven to have the greatest benefit for the least prioritized. But any encouragements about money often lead our emotions to react with fear and anger before our minds and compassion can maximize rationality and restoration. And I am certainly not exempt from those feelings.
Both the Healing Hereafter ebook series and Bless BIG – our partner in bringing high impact-per-dollar healing to people right now – are free to use and never receive money from anyone. But in this post I’m not going to ask you to give to anyone – and certainly not me. What I would ask is to remember the good reasons and intentions you’ve had when suggesting something hard…but necessary and life-giving. Especially if you had decades of history, robust scientific evidence, the Bible, and even common sense supporting your encouragement.
The relief and freedom of letting go
This clip (enjoy!) perfectly illustrates how it feels to ask friends simply to use what they can, to benefit people with a need they care for in proven high-impact ways. Even better, the clip shows how someone lets their mind and compassion push through the defensiveness to bless themselves and so many others! Even when they didn’t want to.
The Lord of the Rings is already awesome as a movie, but it’s even better where it teaches perseverance in healing people’s hereafters…
1. Our shiny things are often used for amusement but play a much more important role that should not be taken lightly.
2. Those who remind us of that often seem to be annoyingly serious or overbearing (literally in this case!).
3. This is because our treasure has the power to save or destroy countless lives (including our own), depending on whether or not we can let it go.
4. We overestimate our ability to let it go…and how often, how much, and how effectively we let it go.
5. We get angry at those who encourage us how to use it apart from ourselves. And we blame them for our frustration, even if they never take anything for themselves.
6. Sometimes only a blunt and jarring encounter with the true friend behind the falsified enemy can remind us of who they are, who we are, and how free we could be.
7. We wrestle with our shiny things…but hopefully have the mastery to let them go. If death is the only thing that can separate us from our precious (as it typically was for the Ring’s bearers and typically is for our assets today), then it is not we who are altruistic in spite of death. Is it death who is finally able to bless others in spite of us. Letting go is one way we can beat death – and in more ways than one!
8. The more often and abundantly we let our shiny things go for the sake of others, the more happily we live ever after. And the more we allow the world to do likewise (Click to tweet).
Our global neighbors continue to die;
It’s our duty and joy to continue to try.
(Click to tweet)
And trying is so easy, so effective, and so exciting when you know you’re making a bigger difference!
May this post find you with many reasons to give thanks as the holiday season begins.
