We have all heard the phrase, “It is better to give than to receive.” Growing up, I hated this phrase because hearing it generally meant that I was being called out for selfishness by someone who was, in fact, the boss of me. I later came to discover that this idea came from the book of Acts in the Bible, where Paul tells the group who is gathered around him “…you must help the weak and remember the words of Lord Jesus, that he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’.”https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=more+blessed+to+give+than+to+receive&qs_version=NIV Sorry for dissing you Jesus! I didn’t know that these words were said on your beat. However, I do have a question. I understand that giving to others is a blessing that redounds back onto the giver. However, if everyone is going around trying to give themselves silly, who is left to do the receiving? Don’t some folks have to take a break from giving in order to receive what’s being offered? Otherwise, this whole thing doesn’t work. Right?
Well, I wasn’t there when Jesus said it so I don’t know exactly how he envisioned this whole give/take thing going down. However, I can tell you this: The one thing that often serves as a blockade to my friendship with other women is their unwillingness to let me do them any favors. Do you know the friend I am talking about? The one who is clearly as sick as a fat dog on a hot day but turns down your offer to make dinner and drop it by? The one who never lets you pay for lunch, even on her birthday? The one who only tells you the good stuff about her life and cleans her house before you come over? This is also the person who is constantly offering to drive everyone for car pool and who donates half of the supplies for every class party all year. In fact, it is nearly always the case that this woman is so generous that you’d like to hug her for an awkwardly long time. God bless her! I understand where she is coming from. We are taught from girlhood that our highest goal is to “be nice.” Because being nice and selfless gets rewarded with “atta girls” every time we do it, we eventually get a clear message. The message is that you have to keep giving everything away in order to be good and you have to be good in order to be loved. We all want love so off to the giving races we go.
The problem with all this furious giving is that if we are not careful, our generosity makes us think well of ourselves while our motives are actually really bad. “You are so amazing!” our girlfriends will tell us. “You are truly the most generous person I know!” As Jesus predicted, it does feel really good to give. God is a giver and when we act like him, our souls just naturally expand. Nonetheless, constant giving can mask a really pernicious soul-sickness with which every human being on earth struggles — pride. Pride hides really well behind a mask of generosity because giving all the time is the perfect excuse to avoid humbling ourselves in front of our friends. By contrast, when we receive, we are in the vulnerable position of having a real need that we can’t or don’t want to meet by ourselves. It can be scary to open our hands and see if someone loves us enough to fill them. Sadly, if we never do so then all the people that we love miss out on the joy of filling our open hands. Ironically, one of the most selfish responses we utter as women is, “Oh no, I’m fine, thanks.” That chipper little phrase can feel downright mean to people who want to care for a friend who is clearly not fine.
In addition, being a constant giver weakens the bonds women have with loved ones. As a result, living a lifestyle in which a woman is always the giver and her friends are always the receiver is extraordinarily lonely. There’s no intimacy in having it all together. In my younger years, when I had babies and frequently went over to the houses of other people who had babies, I remember one recurring pattern. The minute I walked into the spotless home of a woman with a child under three years of age, I immediately thought, “I don’t trust you…not in the slightest.” By this, I did not mean that I thought the woman was a liar. Instead, what I meant was, “Oh! You won’t trust me with your imperfections. You won’t tell me when you are sad or mad or jealous. You won’t let me make you soup when you have surgery. So that means I, also, cannot share that stuff with you. You think there is shame in it.” Inevitably, those people never became my close friends. They instead became “clean” friends with whom I’d push strollers through the mall and talk about the weather. I keenly felt how lonely these women must be but I never came to know them because I am a respecter of closed doors.
If you are that woman, I’d urge you to open the door. There is a whole gaggle of women waiting in the wings to buy you birthday gifts (please do tell the truth when we ask you what you want) and pick up your kids (yes, they will spill cracker crumbs in my car…don’t sweat it) and leave a blueberry muffin on your porch when you feel sad but you don’t really know why. Also, you can still give generously! We want your genius life hacks and your amazing Instapot dinners in our lives. We want you to run the school parties and bravely hand out glitter pots to first graders like they are not nuclear weapons of craft despair. We admire you. We messy girls will not stop admiring you when you finally get around to confessing that sometimes your children irritate you. In fact, we’ll admire you more because then we’ll actually know you for real. We’ll like the real you because humility is so much more attractive than pride. I swear it on the stack of dirty dishes in my sink. They’ll be there tomorrow too. Please come on over anyway.
Karolyn says
Love it Amy! xo!
Chuck Barnes says
So much wisdom …..
So much usually unspoken truths ….
Perceptive, engaging and so much like Amy. Loved it!