About Giving Unitarian Society of Hartford

About Giving

By Carolyn Soutter

About Schmidt ... and the shock of giving to the unknown.

Shock is good sometimes. Three shocks in a twenty-four hour period and you become a bit unsure of the seat underneath you. That tingling electrical feeling tells you you're about to be transported to a new place, and you may not be quite sure how you got there.

Shock #1: 7:10 PM Saturday, February 1, 2003

Having read that the new Jack Nicholson movie, About Schmidt, was about a man so depressed from having lost practically everything important in his life, that Jack Nicholson said he kind of let himself go physically when he was playing the part, not seeing any point in making himself undepressed after shooting a scene only to have to go back and act depressed again the next day, and sometimes wondering "Will I ever get out of this?"... I never imagined that such a story could be so inspiring.

It was the miracle of giving that saved Warren Schmidt. Newly retired, flipping through the daytime TV channels for something to relieve his boredom, he came across one of those Angela Lansbury commercials inviting viewers to save a starving overseas child for just $22.00 a month. The next scene has Schmidt almost guiltily sneaking off to the post office to put his check into the mail. When the Save The Child Organization informs him that the child he's supporting would like to hear something about him, he finds himself unable to stop writing ... about his disappointments in his wife, his daughter's fiancé, his career, his life ... and soon enough we're hearing his deepest concerns through these letters to an illiterate six year old child he's never met, who lived at least 6,000 miles away, and didn't speak a word of English. And, by the end of the story, the privilege of giving this $22.00 monthly gift to someone outside of his life has become the most important thing in his life.

Shock #2: 10:45 AM Sunday, February 2, 2003

Listening as our guest speaker, Michael Durall, author of Creating Congregations of Generous People, began by announcing that our morning cash collection would not be used by our congregation at all, but instead would be given to Hartford charities, I was thinking ... can we really afford to do this? What about our bills? What about our roof? What ever happened to waiting to see if we have enough money for all the things we want before we start giving money away to people we've never met? It took a moment for his logic to hit me ... he was challenging our congregation to do what it hopes we members will do! To NOT wait to see if there's anything left over after we've gotten everything we want before we make our gift to the Society ... but to make that gift FIRST. In his book, Durall writes about a banker who handled the family finances by dividing the bills into two categories – those he had to pay, and those he chose to pay. In a category by itself, the first check he wrote wasn't to pay a bill at all – it was to the church. This made him very happy. (It was later announced that we took in over twice as much as usual that Sunday.)

Shock #3: 2:00 PM Sunday, February 2, 2003

After church, we drove to Massachusetts to visit our daughter, Alexis, who'll be graduating from Tufts Vet School in May. She's passed her boards, has lined up a job with a Veterinary Hospital in Farmington, and soon will be making the first real money in her life. I was still processing Mike Durall's sermon, trying to think if such an odd-feeling change could actually be right for our congregation, when Alexis said she'd been giving the matter of charitable giving a lot of thought recently. As soon as she gets her first paycheck, she plans to give a generous percentage to an organization that trains rescue dogs. Starting out in life, there are student loans to pay back and a million things she needs to buy, but she said that she wants some portion of what she earns to count for something other than herself. It seemed to her that her work will probably be more meaningful if she always budgets for a charitable gift before she pays her other bills.

Wow!

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 2/21/05)