This is an exciting post for me! For the first time in more than two and a half months, I am able to write new material following a hard drive crash and an inability to retrieve my blogger password. I've really missed fleshing out new ideas so I hope to pen some good stuff in the near future. Thanks for sticking with me or, at least, welcome back! And thanks to Jon Berglund for getting me back up and running with a repaired laptop!
We are in the middle of our 22nd year of collecting loose change at WCS to help works in Honduras and Haiti which focus on children. During that time, we have raised close to $200,000 for the organizations we partner with, Mission Lazarus and Hope For Haiti's Children. This is really an ongoing project which has become a part of the fabric of our school over the decades. Our kids receive bank bottles each year and collect pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters which we apportion between these two wonderful agencies. (It's completely voluntary.) Over the years, I've witnessed some amazing acts of generosity from kids ranging from five to eighteen and this year has been no different.
I was in my classroom after school one day not long before Christmas break when a former student walked in. An extraordinary young man, I also taught his sister and his wonderful mom was a colleague of mine for a number of years. He's in college now and after our greeting, he stuck a wadded up plastic HEB grocery bag into my hand and told me to use it as I saw fit. I assumed it was a roll of quarters and didn't even open it until he had been gone for a good while. When I finally unwrapped the gift, I found $300 inside. Three hundred dollars. The next day, I divided the money into two parts, putting it towards the college education of three sisters in our church in Vietnam as well as our Honduras/Haiti fund which we keep year round. I left him a Facebook message and as expected, he approved of the apportioning of his donation.
This week on Wednesday, our MOMS IN PRAYER group came to my room late in our first period time slot to hear a brief presentation from me on the aforementioned Honduras/Haiti project. Before school started, I was straightening up Room 258- don't want a messy place for my honored guests! I noticed one of the new bank bottles that a middle school girl had turned in to me last week, shortly after I had distributed them. The bottle, which felt like it had only a few coins in it, was lying under my desk so I picked it up and proceeded to pour the contents into one of the five gallon containers we use as receptacles. Imagine my shock when a $100 bill fell out! I found this girl's older sister in the hall and she thought it had come from the young lady and not from their folks. I found her in class and learned the sibling was correct- she had indeed put in her own one hundred dollars. I'm pretty sure I had never even seen a bill that large at her age!
Here is the remarkable thing about both of these youngsters and their generosity; neither one called any attention to the amount of the gift. I told the young lady, one of my favorite people in the world, that if I had been her at that point in my life, I would have said, "Coach Hawley, you need to be careful because there is a $100 bill in there!" Both of the donors were discreet, a trait sorely lacking among many of us, including me. We believe in giving credit where credit is due, even when it means calling attention to ourselves. Jesus was very plain when He laid out the guidelines for proper giving. In Matthew 6, the Savior said,
2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
You might note there are no mentions of tax write offs or public recognition in that paragraph. The Lord explains the only reward worth having comes from above, Pats on the back on earth are nice but eternal blessings from heaven dwarf temporary compliments. We shouldn't give to please people but to please God. Many kids will be helped, maybe even rescued, by the contents of a plastic bag and a plastic bottle. As you can't tell a book by its cover, you can't tell a gift by its container. But maybe you can learn about about human hearts by the manner of the transaction. Some people don't need trumpets.
Applicable quote of the day
“There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother.”
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