Open Hands

The Practice of Percentage Giving

Money. It represents a timeless source of striving, fear, elation, and envy. How to break free? How to find contentedness in seasons of plenty and of want? The answer is equally timeless. Open up. Give. Regularly. Here’s a how-to.

The Dark Power

Give a five-year-old a dollar and watch their fingers clench around the bill. Consider your own hand holding a loose diamond. There is an energy required to grasp and protect. Certainly, this is an appropriate position as we hustle through a crowd.

But we don’t spend most of our days hustling valuables through a crowd. Most days our physical resources are protected - in a bank, in real estate, in the stock market. And yet our heart still wraps tightly around them, strongly saying, “MINE.”

Such a strong grasp over time limits the heart’s flow. Over time, these physical expressions of rich-ness become a dark power. The loss of the precious ring in Tolkien’s Hobbit drives Gollum into mad pursuit.

Do you know of what I speak? Have you watched your heart wrap around something of physical value? A nice car?Or a home?Or the value of a stock portfolio? It can be anything around which we hear the whisper, “MINE.”

An Antidote

Luckily, we have been given an antidote. We have a serum to relax our heart’s grasp. It comes in the simple act of sharing, in giving a bit of what we value so greatly to others.

Now, for a heart clenched for some seasons of life, sharing can be challenging. What we practice becomes habit. And habits become hard. But regardless of their strength, habits are not cast in stone.

Like clay that softens and becomes moldable as it warms, our hearts can be reworked into a new form. Small acts of generosity begin the process.

Pick a Percentage

To get started, pick a percentage of your take-home pay you would like to give away. The percentage really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do it every two weeks when the paycheck hits your bank account.

Create a separate account named GIVING. Every time you get paid, simply log into your bank and transfer your giving percentage to your giving amount. Simple. Over time you will be surprised at how it begins to add up.

Finally, and this is the fun part, look for places to practice generosity. It could be a monthly gift to a nonprofit or church. It could be ad hoc giving to those around you who are in a hard season. My wife and I do a bit of both. In all forms, giving becomes a joyful practice.

Do It Every Month

The key to the practice is to keep it up in seasons of want as well as plenty. If your resources wane, it may be you need to reduce your percentage. But keep up the practice. Even if you pull just $10 a month to your GIVING account, the effect is the same: our attention is pulled from our own life to the lives and needs of others.

And if you are in a season of plenty, consider giving more. These days, the needs are bigger than ever.