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Why Give to the Ungrateful?
Learning to follow Jesus' model of generosity.
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Another woman, invited to a wedding, complained that our church's Clothes Closet, which offered free clothes to anyone in need, had nothing suitable. I invited her to my house to borrow one of my dressier outfits, but she never showed up. When, at her request, I took her some bags of my clothes as a gift, she handed them back to me. "These aren't what I had in mind" was all the thanks I received. A family who visited the Clothes Closet while I was there decided the free clothes weren't enough. They stole my purse. That's six, and I could easily give you three more to represent the nine lepers who received thanklessly. But what about the tenth? The tenth was a woman, a frequent clothing recipient. One Christmas, she handed me carefully wrapped packages containing four pairs of hand-crocheted booties, a pair for each person in my family. They were colorful and toasty warm. I was touched, but I shouldn't have been surprised. This was the same woman who, whenever her children outgrew donated clothes, returned them to the church for other needy people to use. Do we give to be thanked?Clearly, cups of cold water are not always graciously accepted. The question is, so what? I can't find any verses where Jesus promised his followers little gold stars to paste on their foreheads each time they cleansed a leper. Certainly Jesus didn't walk around with gold stars all over his face. Thorn scrapes and spit and slap marks and tears, yes. But no gold stars. I began asking myself, Why do I feel the need to be thanked, anyway? No doubt, part of it is pride: How dare you not appreciate my efforts! Part of it may be my sense of decorum: Don't you understand common courtesy? Perhaps we feel disgust: You act as if the world owes you this aid! Or fear: If I were in crisis, would I be grateful for people's support or mortified by my own dependency? When victims say thank you, our inner turmoil at seeing their helplessness is assuaged a little. Ah, we think, we have done the right thing. We have made a difference. When they're unresponsive, we feel impotent: So the gift didn't count! Of course, we can't always know whether our offerings matter to the recipients or not. But when Jesus said, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me," he never promised that the brothers would care. The fact that some are (or seem) ungrateful is irrelevant. Hidden benefitsIronically, there can be unexpected compensations for giving without expecting thanks. My 7-year-old daughter had a boy in her first-grade schoolroom who trailed far behind the class in his reading progress. Trina gathered her own set of two dozen beginning-reader books, which she was long beyond, and took them to class so the struggling boy would have a wider variety of easy books to read. Another time, she eagerly selected half of her collection of stuffed animals and declared them a gift for the children of Clothes Closet visitors. |             | |||||||||||||||||||
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