Many of us want to make a fresh start as we begin another New Year. If we sense that we are on the right track in regard to the development of our lives, we will want to remain on course. Sometimes as we look back, we realize that we have gotten off course from becoming the persons that the Lord wants us to be. The beginning of a New Year invites and challenges us to do what we need to do to develop in accord with the Lord’s plan for our lives.
Regardless of where we are on our spiritual journeys, I offer the following as a possible New Year’s resolution, namely that we each reflect upon God’s generosity to us and then to consider how we are responding to this with our time, abilities and financial resources.
At this time, I invite each of us to focus upon how we are responding to the Lord for His work with our financial resources. In their visit to the Christ-Child, the wise men offered gifts of significant financial worth. The way that we relate to money is a very spiritual matter.
Whether we give to the Lord for His work through our home parish on a regular basis or not, I invite us to reflect upon what we are giving in relation to what we are receiving. During the past year, has our income increased? If it has, hopefully we will want to adjust what we give to our parish accordingly. If our income has decreased over the past year, we would adjust what we contribute accordingly.
A possibility for determining the amount that we might offer for the Lord’s work is to consider giving a definite percentage of our total gross income. We can start anywhere. The Biblical model for contributing to the Lord for His work is 10% of our gross income. All gifts are welcome.
Hopefully, what we contribute for the Lord’s work comes from right off of the top of what we receive. If we are in the habit of giving a percentage of our income for the Lord’s work, we might pray and reflect about the possibility of increasing our gift by 1 or 2% for the calendar year that we are just entering. If we are willing to do this each year, in time, we will become tithers.
Let’s look at the effects that proportional financial sacrificial giving might have. Many are experiencing that when we put the Lord first in regard to spending our money, things do fall into place in regard to our financial affairs. As we allow the Lord to influence our priorities in life, we come to realize that we can get along well without having a number of the things and/or experiences that we are led to believe that we need to have for the good life. We grow in the ability to experience an abiding peace that no one can take from us.
As each of us who reads this letter embraces financial sacrificial giving as a response to the Lord for His goodness to us, we will have, as a parish community, the resources that are needed both to maintain and to expand what the Lord would accomplish in and through our respective parish communities.
By God’s grace, the torch of opportunity is still in our hands. I hope and pray that we will relate to the invitation to practice financial sacrificial giving as an opportunity to be embraced rather than as an ordeal to be endured. What a joy it can be to participate with our financial means in the Lord’s redeeming work in our Parish and in the larger community in which we all live!
Have a Happy and Blessed New Year!
Fr. Nelson Beaver – Pastor