As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
The Holy Ghost opened the Bible up again today to Proverbs Chapter 11 verse 25.
In this Christmas season, this verse is one to contemplate, as what I will write will be used as an excuse by the Scrooge to not be giving, will upset those who do give in thinking they are not doing enough, and convict very few at heart and most of those it does, are not guilty to begin with......and that not guilty part will be seized upon the self righteous stingy souls.
King James Bible
The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.
25The generous man will be prosperous, And he who waters will himself be watered.
The summation of the above is the line from Scrooge, in promising "I will keep Christmas in my heart every day of the year". It is not about money all the time, or the expensive gifts, but in the same reality you can not pay your electric with a smile, and buying an IRS agent a car will be called a bribe and get one into prison. It is about your attitude inside your heart.
What is a generous soul?
Picture yourself in the mirror, do you see someone who people are put off by or someone they would engage in friendly conversation? I realize many of you exist in metropolitan areas where people are all asses, will not speak, scowl all the time and have that 1000 yard stare, but in the brier patch over half the people I meet are people who banter, are smiling and will invoke something pleasant because they are generous souls. Generous in human kindness.
The remainder, I usually can get a smile out of, but 2 out of ten are just scowling souls who are walled off to the world.
In this Trump keeping in rapist foreigners who murder, one has to be careful in who they engage in large metro areas, but it is the point in all of this, when people meet you, when you are at work, do they leave feeling better for the experience or feeling you what a son of a bitch you are?
That is what I mean about the generous soul.
When my Uncle died, the Church was filled overflowing. It was a madhouse at the hospice for people stopping by. By contrast the owner of the place Mom is now on was a landlord who no one liked. My dad said in that funeral, there was Mom and him, his wife, and his brother and his wife. Six people showed up for a very rich man, who was a businessman in town all his life, and of those 6 dad and Mom had to go, and so did the others. That is not a generous soul.
The problem for most of you is you look at Christmas as trying to make up for things in your being an ass, to people who are asses, and they do not appreciate your gifts in the first place and always want more, and are waiting for you to die, so they can get all you have.
That is not to say that poor people are grateful either. Jesus in the 10 lepers found 9 were worthless and only 1 returned. What I mean by this in Spirit is, you can go out and spend 100,000 dollars on pearls, but if you throw them before pigs who would stomp on them, you soon learn to be stingy, because you made the mistake in thinking people would appreciate what you gave.
Put it this way, give 10 people a new car, and 9 of them will rod it to the ground in being pissed they took charity, pissed at you being rich, pissed at you expecting a thank you every day, and pissed at the world and taking it out on a car. 1 out of 10 would treat that car like a gem, and will still have it 20 years from now.
Rich people have to be responsible what they invest in. You do not get away with charities as most are swindlers, because God said to sow, not bestow onto others doing the work for you. Most people can not handle large sums of money and giving them large sums, or expensive gifts they would ruin them or themselves.
But that is not an excuse for the rich to not be generous. You simply have to be led where God says His money should go.
Poor people always have the reason they are poor in not giving. No one should be bankrupting themselves, but at the same time Jesus spoke of the Widow's Mite in she gave all she had to God, and yes the priests never appreciated it no doubt and were looking at the bag of gold.
So what is this all about in summation, it is your generous heart and it takes more work now to be generous. Generous is putting shopping carts back so someone at the grocery does not have to wear their knees out putting away 1000 carts a day, because people are too important to stoop to cleaning after themselves. Generous is making small talk with people.
I was speaking with a clerk at a grocery who said her boss told her, "YOU TALK TO PEOPLE BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY INTERACTION MOST OF THOSE PEOPLE GET". It is good business and why the store of my brother's friend has a constant parade of customers buying things. It is making the effort to care about people a that is what generous is, it is caring about someone else. It is holding the door for a cripple. It is when my back hurts and everything else feels like hell that I stop and help a woman loading bottled water into her car, just because she looked worse off than me.
I am not a millionaire. I live in dead people's clothes from the thrift store, but I still try and this week was Christmas for the neighbors. See I have neighbors who do all sorts of things for me and they always come when we call. First reason is, I say THANK YOU and I tell them how much I appreciate it. Second, when they do something like baling hay, I pay them promptly. Lastly, I always get them an 18 pack of beer on Christmas. I know people start expecting things when you give things, but I can spend 16 dollars on beer, and Dan will constantly come and feed cattle, and he always cleans our drive way out. That is really cheap labor for me and it makes the point when I have to scoop snow by hand.
I have had bad neighbors that I paid for work and they did miserly returns like only blowing snow from their driveway to my driveway. Allot of good that did with the highway 3/4 of mile away.
By contrast TL's old man, lives in the metro and had a neighbor who blew their long driveway out once. I think TL's sister baked some cookies for the guy and that was it. From that point on no more snow was blown and the old man makes the old lady shovel the snow, as it is amazing how the snowblower never works when it snows.
Generous heart was not the cookies, because there was not a generous heart behind it. Put it this way, 18 cans of beer means 18 times my neighbors will think over the next few months, LC gave me that beer. Small things given to please people in what they really want is what a generous soul is, as you could give me solid gold golf clubs and I would think, "I guess I can use them to whack cows with to get them to move".
You have to have a generous heart as God does, as He puts up with your not appreciating most things like getting out of bed each day or having food that is not cat food in a can. It does not take much to say PLEASE and THANK YOU. It does not take much to keep your mouth shut when someone is being a pain, because they will remember your being an ass to them and retaliate. It just keeps producing that endless cycle of misery, which has people thinking they can use money and gifts to buy love and friendship on people not worth it, when they should be creating their own generous heart, and finding other hearts who will appreciate their being around.
The problem in this, is no one learned anything from the above. People will still be phobic in having to give lucre to try and be loved and will still not give things in making some excuse. Others will think there is not an opportunity, but opportunities are always there in being pleasant, even when some condescending blonde behind the counter is waiting on me. Amusing thing in that story is her boss in my niece's husband, and of course if she knew that, it would have been a different story. God sees it all though and that is all that matters as He does the avenging and not me, even if the thought comes to mind, but the generous heart fights it off past the hurt, and does what the Father will be pleased by.
The liberal soul at Christmas is one which reveals they care, not passing it off on a regime program or not bothering to smile at someone. It is about being generous in who you are in approaching most situations with the idea of, "Would I like to meet me and be pleased after the experience or would it just be another miserable thing which happened today?"
God bless each of you with the Spirit of Christmas in the True living it is. You are the gift God gave to the world to not be a problem in it. Most of you are never going to save the world, but you certainly can at the very least not make it a worse place.
Just be good to people by being good and in time you will discover that the people who appreciate it will start being good to you, because of your generous soul giving the good of God in you.
Nuff Said
agtG
