Giving Self
A very conscientious Christian lady looked back on her girlhood in a big city. She was from a well-to-do family and as she put it, “The poor were our pets.” On Sunday it was the favorite charity of these superior Christians to make the rounds of the cells at the police station.
The men in particular did this. They visited the weekend drunks, lectured them, forced them to take the pledge, and then bailed them out of jail so they would be back to work on Monday.
These do-gooders were smugly respectable, very visibly in a different moral category from those to whom they gave…
They had one fault: they never gave themselves. When we stoop and give from on high, even out of the sense of Christian duty, but we never give ourselves, our giving is incomplete. No gift is complete unless we ourselves are in it.
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